Indiana job growth is in middle of pack when compared with neighboring states.
July 21, 2004
Hoosier job growth was smack in the middle last month when compared with its neighbors, new U.S. Department of Labor figures show.
Indiana gained jobs at a faster rate than Michigan and Ohio, both of which lost positions, but at a slower pace than Illinois and Kentucky.
However, a nagging problem remained common to all -- a flat manufacturing sector.
Stubbornly sluggish manufacturing job growth could slow the overall economy of the industrial Midwest, said George Erickcek, senior regional analyst at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, an independent nonprofit in Kalamazoo, Mich.
"I'm not expecting the Midwest to really bounce back rapidly," said Erickcek, who believes the region will probably lag the national rebound.
Unemployment rates, also reported Tuesday, showed Indiana dropping to a seasonally adjusted 4.8 percent from 5.2 percent in May and 5.6 percent in June 2003. Joblessness was lower than in surrounding states.
Separately, the Builders Association of Greater Indianapolis reported Tuesday that home building permits swelled to 1,312 in June for Marion and surrounding counties, as well as Madison County. Because permits aren't adjusted for seasonal fluctuations, they are most accurately compared with the same month the year before. The number was up from 1,251 in June 2003 but short of the record 1,482 of 2001.
June was a good month for jobs in Indiana after having trailed the nation in growth since February.
The 4,100 nonfarm jobs Indiana gained last month pushed total employment up 0.14 percent, to 2,916,600. That was better than the national average of 0.9 percent.
Still, the industrial Midwest has recovered few bread-and-butter manufacturing jobs.
December will mark the fifth anniversary of peak manufacturing employment in Indiana before the economy slowed and the state sloughed off more than 90,000 of the jobs.
Upjohn Institute's Erickcek said he wishes he could be more optimistic about the Midwest in general.
About a third of the jobs will return, he predicted. "They will not -- they will not -- reach the same levels as they did in 1999."
Terry Thurman, Region 3 director of the United Auto Workers, said Big Three automakers are beginning to call some members back to work, but that gains won't be healthy unless President Bush is unseated and trade policies are made more conducive to U.S. manufacturers.
"A country can't survive, a state can't survive, a community can't survive on service-type jobs," Thurman said.
His comments came hours after Gov. Joe Kernan announced policies to help create jobs in communities hit by layoffs.
The departments of Commerce and Workforce Development will arrange a single point of contact for monitoring and documenting unfair trade practices, and matching grants will be given to communities wanting to invest in job creation, Kernan said in a statement.
Although federal trade policies helped Indiana export a record $16 billion of goods last year, manufacturers have been hit by foreign government subsidies, illegal steel dumping and the Bush administration's imposing steel tariffs too late and then lifting them too early, Kernan said.
Ellen Whitt, a spokeswoman for Kernan's Republican rival, Mitch Daniels, said Indiana isn't participating in the "rousing" national recovery, and that the state needs new leadership in order to pull itself up by the bootstraps.
Erickcek said the expected weak recovery of manufacturing jobs will dampen the overall economy as retailers, for example, struggle to sell goods.
Several factors are slowing manufacturing employment:
• Underused factories have plenty of capacity to churn out more products with similar numbers of workers as the economy expands, he said.
• Hard times in the past few years have weeded out inefficient factories, leaving remaining plants even less dependent on large numbers of people.
• Moreover, because factories generally are built closest to the demand for their products, they increasingly will be in faster-growing areas of the country and the world, Erickcek said.
"I worry about the place of the Midwest overall," Erickcek said.
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