Ramel Turner (left) and Earl Nelson scan merchandise for pricing at the Wauwatosa Whole Foods Market store on Feb. 23. About 120 people were hired to staff the newly built store, which opened the next day. Credit: Angela Peterson

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Turning in another subpar employment report, Wisconsin gained 29,616 private-sector jobs in the 12 months through September 2015, a 1.2% increase that lags behind the national pace of 2.2% in the same period, according to reliable data released Wednesday.

"It's really striking how we seem to be stuck in a place we can't get out of," said Dale Knapp, research director at the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, a Madison-based nonpartisan economic research group.

The latest data, released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, rank the Badger state 36th among the 50 states in the pace of job creation in the latest 12-month period.

Wednesday's data comes from the most accurate and reliable employment data gathered by the government. Called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, it's based on an ongoing census of 96% of businesses across the nation, in every state and every sector. The quarterly census tracks the economy in rolling 12-month increments, measured every three months.

Though typically published with a six-month time lag, census results have proved to be more reliable than monthly data, which are based on small samples of employers.

The latest quarterly results are on par with Wisconsin's performance in recent years. Wisconsin continuously has trailed the national rate of job creation since July 2011.

And Knapp pointed out that Wisconsin's manufacturing-centric economy has clocked comparatively slow jobs growth since at least 2002, with only infrequent exceptions.

Running the jobs data back to 2002, just as the nation was emerging from a recession triggered by the September 2001 terrorist attacks, Knapp examined 153 individual months of job growth, each measured in year-over-year segments.

He found that two-thirds of that period showed Wisconsin's national job ranking in the 30s or worse.

Wisconsin ranked in the top 20 in only 15 of those 153 months, and 11 of those were in periods when the nation was in the early stages of crawling out of recession. In those periods, when Wisconsin ranked favorably, the growth rate averaged 0.8%.

Commenting on the latest figures, Knapp said: "It's really more of the same."

In the job creation rankings in the latest 12 months, Wisconsin trailed most other states in the Midwest, lagging behind Michigan (23rd), Indiana (24th), Illinois (29th), Minnesota (31st) and Ohio (35th). Wisconsin, however, outpaced Iowa (43rd).

Manufacturing remains the largest employment sector in the state, even as the rest of the nation has expanded more quickly its share of jobs in retailing, fast food, restaurants and health care.

Wisconsin added 3,816 manufacturing jobs in the latest period, an increase of 0.8%, nearly the same as the 0.9% national average in the period.

That placed Wisconsin 25th in manufacturing job growth during those 12 months, behind Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio, and ahead of Illinois and Iowa. It also matches the national rate of manufacturing job creation of 0.9%.

It was a similar story in the low-wage leisure and hospitality sector, which includes jobs in hotels, restaurants and fast-food outlets. Wisconsin added those jobs at a 3.1% rate, an increase of 8,380, while the national rate was 3.2%.