ON TUESDAY, the Bureau of Labour Statistics released its latest employment figures for American metropolitan areas, for the month of February. I thought it might be a good opportunity to take a look at dynamics of labour-market recovery across the country's biggest cities. The charts below are drawn from data on the 50 largest metropolitan areas (thanks to our research and graphics departments for help preparing these). First up, a look at employment growth over the past year:

In the year to February, only two of the country's biggest metropolitan areas saw net employment declines: Sacramento, California and Providence, Rhode Island. In Sacramento, the decline was mostly due to continued drops in state and local government employment; private employment was essentially flat over the year. In Providence, by contrast, government employment rose; lingering weakness across the economy seemed to be the issue. The employment profiles across other cities are somewhat idiosyncratic, but with a couple of big exceptions (Los Angeles) the cities enjoying the biggest job gains over the past year are...the biggest cities. As we expand the period we examine, that ceases to be the case. Here is the employment change since the end of the recession:

The lingering impact of the bubble shows up more clearly here; both Los Angeles and Las Vegas are near the bottom of the list. Among big gainers, Detroit's presence is interesting and indicative of the strong contribution of durable-goods manufacturing to recovery (of course, durable-goods manufacturing contributed even more on the downside). San Jose makes the list. It's interesting to note that the tech boom has lead to steady employment growth in Silicon Valley, but its absence from the previous chart indicates that this job growth is not particularly intense and doesn't seem to be accelerating. Finally, here's the story across the whole of the recession and recovery so far: