Across the United States, jobs are quantified through each
state’s unemployment insurance program. Those programs provide the potential
for laid-off workers to receive unemployment benefits — the goal being to
bridge the gap between workers’ lost jobs and their next jobs. An eligible
recipient’s weekly benefit amount is based upon their earnings from recent
work. This begs the question, how does Utah’s unemployment insurance program
know how much an individual recently earned while working?
That answer is supplied by all businesses that hire workers,
as they must report their employees and pay as mandated by the unemployment
insurance laws. Companies identify their individual workers and those workers’
monetary earnings for a calendar quarter. As businesses are identified by their
industrial activity and geographic location, it is through the unemployment
insurance program that aggregate employment counts by industry and location are
calculated.
Yet each state’s profiling of individuals is quite minimal
in the unemployment insurance program. The U.S. Census Bureau can bring more
light to the overall labor force by supplementing said information with gender,
age, race/ethnicity and educational attainment (imputed from American
Community Survey responses) for Utah’s labor force.
The Census Bureau packages this information through their
Local Employment Dynamics program and makes available said data on its website. Here at the Department of Workforce
Services, we recently downloaded and packaged Utah-specific data from said
website and summarized it in the attached visualization.
Various data “tabs” are available, presenting Utah’s economy
from different angles, ranging from industry shares within the economy to the
age-group distributions of the labor force, to gender and race distributions.
These labor variables can be viewed for the state as a whole, or by each individual
county.
Some statewide highlights:
Industry — industrial distribution is quite diverse, which
provides strength within the economy. Distributions do fluctuate with time,
with manufacturing seeing its share lessen while health care and professional
and business services shares have increased.
Age — the bulk of Utah’s labor force is composed of 25- to
44-year-olds. Older worker shares have increased over the past 15 years, yet
still remain a non-dominant portion of Utah’s labor force. The youngest segments
of the labor force declined noticeably during the Great Recession due to less
participation, and that trend remains.
Educational Attainment — turnover rates are understandably
highest with workers under the age of 25 as they strive to build their educational
foundation and also find their niche in the labor market. A trend does stand
out where the more education that a worker attains, the lower the turnover rate
businesses experience from said educational classes.
Race/Ethnicity — Whites account for around 80 percent of
Utah’s labor force. The Asian community is small but slowly increasing in
share, and is also characterized with the lowest turnover rate and the highest
new-hire wages.
Gender — males comprise about 55 percent of Utah’s labor
force. The female share of 45 percent is higher than the national average.
Roughly 35 percent of working females work part-time compared to 15 percent for
males. Therefore, female new-hire wages are considerably lower than male
new-hire wages. (Note: employer reporting into the unemployment insurance
system is not hourly wage rate reporting but instead total calendar quarter
wages paid. Therefore, calculations can only be made upon total quarterly
wages, and part-time employment weakens this measure).
As for the various counties in the Wasatch Front North region,
here are some labor highlights:
Davis County –
Retail/wholesale trade industries dominate in Davis County
with more than 16 percent of employment. This share has been in decline,
however, since the end of the recession – not due to a decline in these industries,
rather, due to increased growth in professional and business services, which
includes management/scientific/technical consulting services. Alone, this
sector has added more than 1,000 jobs over the last 10 years.
In just the last two years, construction and manufacturing have
both begun to regain some of the share of employment lost after the recession. Non-residential
building construction in particular has added about 500 new jobs since 2013.
Weber County –
Perhaps surprisingly, Weber County has an even larger share
of employment in retail/wholesale trade than Davis County – nearly 17 percent
compared to 16 percent, but that is primarily due to the wholesale portion of
that sector which has a large grocery and related product merchant wholesaler employer
in the Ogden area.
Manufacturing and professional/business services both
compose large shares of Weber County employment, about 14 percent and 15
percent respectively. However, the health care/social services sector has been
increasing its share over the last 15 years more than any other sector. In 2000,
the sector’s share was about 9 percent and now it’s nearly 13 percent – a major
shift. In particular, over that time, the general medical and surgical hospitals
industry has added more than 2,000 new jobs, primarily driven by the new
McKay-Dee Hospital facilities and service expansions in Ogden in the early
2000s.
Morgan County –
In Morgan County, the largest share of employment is in the retail/wholesale
trade sector as well, at about 20 percent. Like Weber County, this is largely
due to the wholesale industry since Browning, the largest employer in the
county, is classified as a wholesaler.
Construction is the next largest sector, although it has
been trending toward a smaller share since the end of the recession. The number
of employed in construction has not changed much in the last 15 years,
averaging between 300 and 350 workers, but the health care/social assistance
sector has been growing quickly – from about 25 jobs in 2000 to more than 170
in 2016, thus edging out construction’s share of the pie. Residential care
facilities and ambulatory health service have been driving that growth.
