It turns out Illinois’ job growth has not been so sluggish after all.
Revisions to state employment data show that Illinois payrolls hit 6.07 million jobs last June, surpassing their prior peak in September 2000 and achieving a long-awaited milestone, the state’s Department of Employment Security said Monday.
Also, the state’s job growth rate for 2017 was revised up to 0.7 percent, from 0.5 percent, and 2016’s job growth rate doubled after the revision, to 0.6 percent from 0.3 percent.
State officials under Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner have regularly bemoaned the state’s failure to surpass the prior payroll peak in September 2000, blaming insufficient business reforms and incentives for making Illinois less competitive. They were singing a different tune with the release of the revised data.
“This new peak employment milestone is a testament to the work that has been done by the Rauner administration to encourage competition, create jobs and reduce burdensome bureaucracy,” Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Director Sean McCarthy said in a news release.
The revisions, an annual process, were released along with new state employment data for January. Illinois’ unemployment rate declined to 4.8 percent in January, from 4.9 percent the previous month, hitting its lowest level since May 2007, according to the preliminary data.
The state added 200 jobs for the month, bringing total nonfarm jobs to more than 6.08 million in January. That’s 26,500 more jobs than in September 2000.
Over the year that ended in January, Illinois added 47,100 jobs, and 20,200 of them were in manufacturing, an important industry because it generally offers decent-paying jobs and is an economic and innovation driver. Other sectors that added significant numbers of jobs over the year include leisure and hospitality, and education and health services.
The sectors that saw the largest jobs declines for the year were information services, which includes industries like telecommunications and broadcasting; and trade, transportation and utilities.
Some of the data revisions were not good news. December payroll numbers were revised to show a loss of 700 jobs, rather than a gain of 1,500 that had initially been reported.
And despite the overall positive data revisions, Illinois still lags behind the nation. Its job growth rate of 0.8 percent over the year ended January was half of the national average of 1.5 percent. The nation’s unemployment rate has been steady at 4.1 percent for several months.
Illinois’ labor force participation rate, which measures how many people are working or looking for work, dipped slightly in January. People leave the labor force when they retire or stop working to go back to school or raise children, though also when they get so frustrated with the job hunt that they stop looking.
The unemployment rate counts only people who are not working but are looking for a job, so it does not take into account those who are sitting out the job market. A fuller accounting of the state’s unemployment situation, called the U-6 rate, includes those discouraged workers as well as people who are working part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time jobs. Illinois’ U-6 rate declined to 9.2 percent in 2017, from 11 percent the year before, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @alexiaer
