Job growth in metropolitan Chicago suddenly has come to a dead halt, according to newly released state data, raising questions about how Illinois as a whole can thrive if its economic engine is idling.

The data is from the latest edition of Where Workers Work, a publication of the Illinois Department of Employment Security. Unlike most jobs numbers, it is based not on surveys and estimates but on an actual hard count of private-sector jobs covered by unemployment insurance that is considered highly reliable.

According to the report, the total number of jobs in the six-county metro area in the year ended March 31 grew just 1,361, to 3,598,232. That's not even a tenth of a percent, and far and away is the lowest annual rise since the city and state began recovering from the subprime mortgage recession a decade ago.

The numbers are preliminary but in past years have changed little after initial publication.

The report found weakness in every corner of the metropolitan area, including downtown Chicago, which had been growing faster than the nation as a whole but now has fallen behind.

Job growth in the central area—defined by the report as the Loop (Central Business District) and outer business ring—was just 7,000 year to year. That’s about half the rise of recent years but still comprised all of the growth in the city of Chicago as a whole.

Most suburban areas shrank, according to the report, with the total number of jobs down in DuPage, Kane, McHenry and Will counties. Lake County defied that trend with a 1 percent growth of 2,888 jobs, but all of Cook County’s total 3,824 job growth came from downtown Chicago.

According to IDES economist George Putnam, the latest figures "surprised us" but may be a bit of a fluke that exaggerates the bad news.

Putnam noted that other employment data found 25,000 jobs growth from January 2018 to 2019, and a 14,000 gain in jobs February to February. The question is whether that trend reversed and went back at least to the January level in the second quarter of the year.

Still, even a gain of 25,000 year to year would be an annual increase of just 0.7 percent at a time when the national job growth rate, after a pending recalibration, is likely to be twice that.

The "it's an outlier" theory also comes from Erin Guthrie, head of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, the state's prime jobs creation agency.

"I think you'll see a whole different figure come March 2020," Guthrie told me in a phone interview. In Chicago in particular, big companies such as Uber, Google and Salesforce continue to expand and add thousands of jobs, and statewide, the impact of Illinois' new $45 billion capital bill will generate others, as will legalized cannabis sales and sports wagering, she added.

Others, however, say the tiny growth is all too consistent with what they’ve been seeing.

“Metropolitan Chicago is experiencing prolonged slow growth,” said Austen Edwards, senior policy analyst at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. “Since 2001, the region’s annual job growth has been approximately one-third the national average. While the region continues to expand employment slightly, national trends are interacting with regional issues to constrain economic growth.”

Ergo, Edwards added, while the March figures may have been a little on the dour side, they generally are in line with the city’s long-term trajectory.

The ultra-slow-growth data also is consistent with U.S. Census Bureau estimates that metro Chicago has lost population in recent years—perhaps because job opportunities are better in other cities.

Whoever is right, the figures indicate that, at least in the March-to-March data, some key industry sectors such as manufacturing, retail, finance, insurance and education lost jobs. Other industries kept growing, but at sharply reduced rates, including professional services, health, administrative support, accommodations and food.

UPDATE—A little more analysis comes from Thomas Walstrum, senior business economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. From an email:

"I believe these data. There’re administrative and they cover almost all the workers in the labor force. So I do think this slowdown is real," he writes. "My best explanation is that this slowdown in jobs growth in Chicago appears to be in line with a slowdown in jobs growth in the Midwest and U.S. as a whole. . . .Because Chicago and the Midwest have been growing slower than the country throughout the recovery from the Great Recession, a slowdown in jobs growth everywhere looks worse here. I wouldn’t interpret these numbers as a sign that the Chicago economy is tanking while everywhere is doing well, but as a reflection of the fact that Chicago is the economic capital of a slow-growing region."

