The Labor Department has recently made public its preliminary estimate of nonfarm employment for 2011. I have added the department’s data for previous years, back to 1999, to construct this table.
Employees on nonfarm payrolls, 1999-2011
(annual average, in thousands)
Year Total Private
1999...... 128,993 108,686
2000..... 131,785 110,995
2001...... 131,826 110,708
2002...... 130,341 108,828
2003...... 129,999 108,416
2004...... 131,435 109,814
2005...... 133,703 111,899
2006...... 136,086 114,113
2007...... 137,598 115,380
2008...... 136,790 114,281
2009..... 130,807 108,252
2010...... 129,818 107,337
2011(p).. 131,159 109,080
The good news is that private nonfarm employment has grown since its recent trough in 2010: the increase in 2011 amounted to 1.6 percent. This is not much, but it’s better than continued decline.
The bad news, however, is that private nonfarm employment in 2011 was still 5.5 percent, or 6.3 million persons, below its peak number in 2007. Moreover, looking back farther, one sees that private nonfarm employment in 2011 was less than the corresponding number in 2000. For private employment, the past ten years have been, indeed, a lost decade.
In contrast, private nonfarm employment grew by almost 22 percent between 1990 and 2000, and by almost 23 percent between 1980 and 1990. Americans need to understand that private employment is “where the babies come from.” Make-work jobs on the government payroll are not a good substitute. To keep the flow of genuinely valued goods and services growing at anything like the historical norm, private employment must grow substantially, at least over the medium term, yet in this regard the past decade has been a complete wash. Moreover, at the present rate of increase (1.6 percent per year), it will take almost 4 years just to get back to the private employment level in 2007, before the current recession began.
Stagnation or slow, on-again-off-again growth in the economy’s most important productive input is not the sort of thing of which sustained economic growth is made. Despite the recent, slight employment gains, the U.S. labor market is not even close to being out of the woods, nor is the overall economy, which continues to labor under major threats of government regulation, taxation, and other damaging intervention in the market process.