Las Cruces Wage Jobs Grow 2%

It’s been a while since a two percent year-over-year wage job growth report appeared in the state. Las Cruces, long a metro laggard, made the grade with two percent growth between July 2015 and July 2016.
Albuquerque and Santa Fe did decently well by the New Mexico low bar with, respectively, 5,300 new jobs and 1.4 percent growth and 1,100 jobs and a 1.7 percent increase. Farmington dropped the ball with a loss of 300 jobs, or 0.6 percent, during the period.
The four-metro net job increase was 7,500, which means the rural counties added 2,100 jobs to make the state’s 9,600 new jobs. All these figures are seasonally unadjusted.
The Department of Workforce Solutions released the July job report this afternoon.
New Mexico lost 6,800 jobs during July and gained 9,600 jobs over the year between July 2015 and July 2016. The July losses concentrated in local government, down 6,100 jobs with 5,000 fewer jobs in education. This DWS explains, is an entirely season phenomenon.
Of the 11,700 education and health services new jobs year-over-year mentioned last week, 3,900 were in Albuquerque, 1,200 in Santa Fe and 500 in Santa Fe. The total for the three metros was 5,600 EHS jobs, or 48 percent of the state total. EHS employees worked an average of 32.1 hours each week and earned $20.27 per hour.
Besides EHS, Albuquerque’s other big gainer was professional and business services with 1,800 new jobs year over year. Leisure and hospitality added 500 jobs. Manufacturing lost 1,200.
The 1,200 new EHS jobs in Las Cruces largely explain the city’s year over year job gain of 1,400 jobs.