One accomplishment â€" well, to the Tea Party it would seem to be an accomplishment â€" of the Obama administration is the recession in government hiring.
The jobs report for February found that governments â€" state, local and federal â€" had 21,851,000 civilian employees, on a seasonally adjusted basis. That was down 32,000, or 0.15 percent, from a year earlier.
This marks the 56th consecutive month, going back to July 2009, that government employment was down on a year-over-year basis, excluding the temporary jobs added for the 2010 census. If you count them, the string is 43 months, going back to August 2010, when most of the temporary workers had lost their jobs.
There has been no other period since they started counting the figures in 1939 that government employment has been so weak for so long. This string is now more than twice as long as the 26-month one in the early 1980’s during the double-dip recessions and the Reagan administration cutbacks. There was also a 50-month string of declines that ended in 1947, caused by the downsizing of the government after World War II ended.
The good news (if you want people to be working) or bad news (if you hate the government) is that this string may finally be nearing an end. The number of government workers rose 13,000 in February. The current figure is only 9,000 under the number for March 2013, so a comparable increase this month would produce a year-over-year increase.
Of course, there are caveats. Some of the decline is because of reductions in employment at the United States Postal Service. But federal government employment outside the post office has been down, on a year-over-year basis, each month for more than two years. State and local government employment was weak during the Great Recession, but has begun to recover.
Governments now employ 15.9 percent of all Americans who have jobs. That is the lowest proportion since 2001.
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