Madison AumentFor 91.9 KVCR News, I'm Madison Aument. This is Economics IE. Each month, IEGO, a nonprofit focused on economic growth in the Inland Empire, publishes the IE Labor Market Pulse. The newsletter analyzes monthly employment data to give readers insight into the IE labor market. Today, I'm speaking with Matt Mena, who's IEGO's Executive Director, about last month's job numbers. Let's start with just kind of like a broad picture of the labor force data.
Matthew MenaSo in July, we did add 10,600 new jobs. We did lose around 14.5 thousand jobs to the region, almost all of which were in government. That's something that we can look at either as seasonal or something that we should really be thinking about, because government is a huge employer in our region. The other piece is that we did also add around 2,000 new warehousing jobs to the region too. So that’s kind of an upswing on the market that we're seeing.
Madison AumentCan you just talk a little bit more about, like, the decline we're seeing in the government sector?
Matthew MenaYeah, the job loss that we're seeing in the government sector is— a lot of them are primarily in the teaching side, so the education sector, which is not unheard of for June to July because of public schools. So, you know, I've had family members that were teachers, and you're starting out, and you get the pink slips at the end of the year. So that's something that we are seeing, but it's also something that we should be kind of aware of in the future, because of where money is going from the federal government.
Madison AumentYeah. So some of this, like the declines in the government sector— because of, I mean, there's so many issues happening between the federal government cutting jobs and then California's budget wasn't looking too hot, right? Part of it too?
Matthew MenaYeah, of course, I think there is a lot of different factors that would come into play. As you know, leadership in each of these agencies are making decisions on who and where to cut. A lot of times it is the newer employees, which is detrimental to the future labor market and the seniority that we're going to see over time. And so all of these are not great indicators. It’s not like the end of the world, but these are all things that we have to keep in mind as we start to kind of see where money is being invested.
Madison AumentYeah. Can you say a little bit more about why it's bad for, like, the future labor market?
Matthew MenaYeah, you always want to have more people coming into a workforce, because that gives us a stronger, more professional workforce throughout time. Because if we're cutting jobs at the very beginning— you know, let's say students who are just graduating college, or you're three years into your career— your productivity in the economy is substantially longer than someone who is, let's say, 57, who's going to be looking at retirement in the next four or five years. Because we're still going to have that decline in four or five years. But if we were to invest in new employees, you would have them for 30 years, and that also increases the pipeline of training and mentorship that we can see over time.
Madison AumentYeah, it's a long game, it sounds like. Exactly. We saw some growth in the warehouse sector, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's where we were seeing some decline for a while, right?
Matthew MenaYeah, yeah. So we saw approximately 6,000 job loss over time— over this past year in warehousing. We did see a bump, like I said before, in the opening of around 2,000 new jobs, which is good, but it also doesn’t negate the job loss that we saw. The other piece is, because labor market information is one piece of the puzzle for the economy. The other piece, especially when you're looking at it in terms of like economic development— the vacancy rates for warehousing is also up. So it’s at around an 8.5%, which means there are empty warehouses that don’t have anybody working in them. And that’s something to keep an eye on, because that also is an indicator on what’s being built and who’s going to be working in there as well.
Madison AumentYou can find this segment and a link to the IE Labor Market Pulse at kvcrnews.org. This segment is funded by the Nowak family. For KVCR News, I'm Madison Aument.
