Off the Charts - In Last Decade, a Lack of Job Growth in the Private Sector - NYTimes.com

Off the Charts - In Last Decade, a Lack of Job Growth in the Private Sector - NYTimes.com

Published: August 7, 2009

FOR the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring.

The accompanying charts show the job performance from July 1999, when the economy was booming and companies were complaining about how hard it was to find workers, through July of this year, when the economy was mired in the deepest and longest recession since World War II. For the decade, there was a net gain of 121,000 private sector jobs, according to the survey of employers conducted each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an economy with 109 million such jobs, that indicated an annual growth rate for the 10 years of 0.01 percent.

Until the current downturn, the long-term annual growth rate for private sector jobs had not dipped below 1 percent since the early 1960s. Most often, the rate was well above that.

As can be seen from the charts, there were some areas of strength in the economy. Health care jobs continued to grow, particularly jobs that involve caring for the elderly. Home health care employment rose at an annual rate of 5 percent, a rate that indicates a total gain of more than 60 percent. On an annual basis, that was twice the overall rate for health care of 2.4 percent a year.

There were also job gains in education and in a host of service industries, including lawyers (0.7 percent a year), accountants (0.9 percent) and computer systems designers (2.4 percent). The field of management and technical consulting leaped at an annual rate of 5 percent.

But while designing computers and related equipment was a growth field, building them was a very different story, as the manufacturing shifted largely to Asia. The number of jobs making computer and electronic equipment in the United States fell at an annual rate of 4.4 percent, substantially more than the overall decline in manufacturing jobs, of 3.7 percent.

That was a better showing than that of the automakers, which shed jobs at a rate of 6.7 percent a year. By contrast, auto dealers cut jobs at a much slower rate of 1.3 percent a year, although that ratemay accelerate later this year as General Motors and Chrysler dealerships are closed.
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