Posted on 01/25/2015 12:01:27 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The Texas Workforce Commission released state employment data today for the month of December, and job growth in the Lone Star State continues to lead, and in fact carry the nation’s improving labor market as the chart above shows. Here are some highlights of the December employment report for Texas:
1. Texas ended the year with the state’s largest ever year-over-year payroll gain with the eye-popping addition of 457,900 new jobs between December 2013 and December 2014. That’s more than 1,700 new payroll jobs that were added every business day last year in the Lone Star State, and 220 new jobs every business hour or almost 4 new jobs added every minute!
2. In just the last month of December, which marked the 51st consecutive month of employment growth, Texas added 45,700 new payroll jobs, which was more than 2,000 jobs every business day, almost 260 jobs every hour, and more than 4 new jobs every minute! The strong job growth in December brought the state’s jobless rate down to 4.6%, the lowest Texas unemployment rate since May 2008.
3. Total December employment in the Lone Star State reached a new record high of 12.45 million workers (11.783 million nonfarm payroll jobs and another 667,000 self-employed and farm workers), which was above the December 2007 level by 1,444,290 jobs (and by 13.1%), see chart above. In contrast, total employment at the end of the year in the rest of the country (US minus Texas) still remained 275,290 jobs below the pre-recession, December 2007 level (see chart above).
It’s a pretty impressive story of how job creation in just one state – Texas – is solely responsible for the 1.169 million net increase in total US employment (+1,444,290 Texas jobs minus the 275,290 non-Texas job loss) in the seven year period between the start of the Great Recession in December 2007 and December 2014. The other 49 states and the District of Columbia together employ about 275,000 fewer Americans than at the start of the recession seven years ago, while the Lone Star State has added more than 1.25 million payroll jobs and more than 190,000 non-payroll jobs (primarily self-employed and farm workers).
And while the oil and gas boom has certainly contributed to making Texas the nation’s No. 1 job creating state by far, the job gains in the Lone Star State have been pretty broadly based across many different sectors and industries. In percentage terms, the 11.5% payroll job gain in the “mining and logging” sector led the state’s 11 industries for job growth last year as that sector added 4,900 new jobs in 2014. An even greater absolute number of new jobs – 47,500 – were added in the state’s booming construction industry, which grew by 7.7% last year. As one example that highlights the construction boom in Texas, there were more permits for single-family homes issued last year through November in just one Texas city – Houston (34,566) – than in the entire state of California (34,035) over the same period. Other sectors with job growth last year above the state’s average payroll increase of 4% include financial activities (+5.1% and +34,800 new jobs) and professional and business services (+5.8% and +85,800 new jobs).
Bottom Line: Texas clearly deserves the title of America’s “economic miracle state.” It’s the most important energy-producing state in the US, and now produces so much crude oil that the state’s daily production of more than 3 million barrels represents more than 37% of the nation’s crude oil and would rank the Lone Star State as the world’s sixth largest oil producer as a separate country. Along with the gusher of shale oil and gas in Texas has come a gusher of more than 1.44 million new jobs since the start of the Great Recession, while the rest of the US hasn’t even yet recovered all of the non-Texas jobs lost during the recession, and employs 275,000 fewer people than in December 2007. Without the strong support of the Texas job machine and without the economic stimulus of the perfectly-timed shale revolution, the Great Recession would have been much longer and more severe, and the current US economic recovery and job market would be much weaker than it is today. Simply put, “Saudi Texas” is the shining star of The Great American Shale Boom, and the American state at the forefront of the US economic recovery.
Now with the satanic Saudis declaring war on our oil and gas industry, we will see how the rest of the country will take up the burden of surviving the Obama Depression.
Texas will endure, as we always have, because we are tough as nails and are still raising men like Chris Kyle.
To whatever extent high tech companies moved from
California with their libtard employees to Texas we
thank the Great Lone Star State. What they did to us they
can now do to you. Someday I can imagine people in
Wyoming complaining how the Texas libs are moving in and
destroying their state.
*****************************************************
Relax Texans, I am kidding more than halfway on this.
Texas should just STFU about their jobs claims before they start attracting libtards to move there. Keep up the “we have tons of guns here” propaganda so the anti-gun libs stay put.
Get ready for the uninformed Freepers posting (1) liberals are moving in and will turn us liberal and those posting (2) illegals are coming in and will turn us Democrat.
Regarding (1): Liberals hate Texas and they aren't coming here. Had one in my house for two days and she was glad to be flying out of this state this morning. Also, someone will post about Austin being liberal and I have explained how that came about early in Texas history. It is one town historically Democrat.
Regarding (2): Illegals voting: Every Texas state office is run by a Republican and that includes the Secretary of State, elections division. I know after working in the state/local Republican Party in elections, that we have safeguards to prevent voting by illegals. It is a state law process of running elections and we Republicans stay on guard to prevent illegal voting of any kind. We do catch most of it.
Spanish people who are legal voters, are voting more for Republicans every year. The State Party has gone into more Spanish areas and opened Republican offices. If you have an office, they will come and I have seen that happen, have been part of opening an office and seeing voters come in that office to discuss elections and gather information.
We opened a Republican office in the county where we lived, there was NO Republican primary in that county and we administered the FIRST ONE. After about 5 general elections, the county turned into a majority of Republican voters. I kept watching the percentages change, less Democrat voting in their primary and our numbers moving up. I knew we would overtake them at that rate and we did.
At every general election, there is a small group of election law knowledgeable Republicans who are connected by a website and phone and anything happening that appears suspect on election day is reported by our workers by phone or to that website, and we deal with the problem right then and fix it. I was in that group one year and never left my chair and computer/phone except for food and bathroom until the polls closed that evening.
Texas is a special place for conservatives and we aim to keep it that way.
What graph would be interesting is the red states’ job creation vs the blue states’ jobs creation.
In IT, we have negative unemployment. We can’t find enough qualified IT people to fill the jobs we have.
15% of total employment gains since the beginning of 2008 have come from the energy industry, even though it is less than 1% of the country’s job base.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/12/investing/oil-prices-job-cuts/
It seems like at the end of every major recession we suffer here in Texas, just as the rest of US is recovering...
due to the oil/gas industries here. Takes a while for them to recover.
We moved here to Texas in 1973 and I couldn’t find another Republican, but now Democrats are rare!
“We moved here to Texas in 1973 and I couldn’t find another Republican, but now Democrats are rare!”
Glad you came to Texas. Yes, Dems are rare and we want to keep it that way.
Many of those jobs should be going to Americans not illegals and Mexican nationals.
Someone should hit “job creator” Perry on how many jobs are going to Mexican Nationals.
We’re about to see how well TX’s economy fares without $100 oil to supercharge it.
Bump
God Bless Texas!
Would this be in general for IT in the region, or limited to specific areas or skill levels?
As I understand it, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin have negative unemployment in programming (Java), system administration (Linux, AIX), database administration (Oracle), and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) development, administration, and support/maintenance.
It’s so hard to find good Java programmers in DFW that Dallas is poaching from Fort Worth, which is not that unusual as a rule, but Dallas headhunters have reached the point of cold-calling past clients regularly to get recommendations for potential hires. The signing bonuses and benefits Dallas is offering are astronomical right now.
Generally speaking, people who work in Fort Worth prefer not to work in Dallas because the drive is awful and Fort Worth employers have pretty laid back office environments. (The Cowtown versus Oil city mentality permeates most things here: employment, schools, etc.)
The kids coming out of college know nothing. They can write code or install and configure databases, but they don’t understand how to apply that knowledge. (Sort of like a new medical school graduate has book knowledge, but isn’t yet a qualified doctor.) So there is a whole new industry opening up in “IT trade schools” where students are taught to apply the mechanics of what they learned in college.
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