Patricia Ortiz (right) works Thursday in the final assembly area at Packaging Solutions Inc.’s south side plant. The company makes reusable custom crates, and it has seen steady business the last few years, according to its president. Credit: Mike De Sisti

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Wisconsin appears to have regained all the net private-sector jobs it lost in the 2008-'09 recession, and the state's unemployment continued to fall last month. But the state also continues to lag behind the nation in the overall pace of job creation, according to state and federal employment reports released Thursday.

The state Department of Workforce Development said Wisconsin's unemployment rate for November fell to 5.2%, down from 5.4% in October and 9.2% in 2010, and at its lowest point following the recession.

The agency also said Wisconsin gained an estimated 16,500 private-sector jobs in November from October. The November figures are preliminary estimates and prone to major revisions. But the monthly gain was larger than the typical margin of error and suggests a positive trend in the month.

The November figure also was sizable enough to suggest that Wisconsin for the first time recovered the private-sector jobs it lost during the deep national recession, the agency said.

Separately, a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that Wisconsin gained 35,021 private-sector jobs in the 12 months from June 2013 to June 2014, a 1.5% growth rate that ranked the state 32nd among the 50 states.

The state lagged the national growth rate of 2.3% for private-sector jobs in the period, continuing a trend that had been in place for the three previous years: Wisconsin has trailed the national rate of private-sector job creation since the second quarter of 2011, the data show.

Known as the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the federal figures track the economy in rolling 12-month increments, measured every three months. They are based on a census of 96% of the nation's employers in the public and private sectors, making the data far more reliable than monthly jobs data, which are based on a sample of only 3% of employers.

Because the quarterly figures are comprehensive and time-consuming to compile, they are released with a half-year time lag, which is why the quarterly jobs data only extend through June.

According to a previous Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of long-term wage and employment data, the state's comparatively slow pace of job creation reflects its reliance on manufacturing industries. Wisconsin also evolved on a different economic path since the start of the millennium compared with the rest of the nation.

The newspaper's analysis found that job creation at the national level predominantly stemmed from low-wage employment in sectors like retail, hospitality, health care and social services. While jobs for cashiers, baristas and home health nurses have proliferated nationally — and now represent the biggest and fastest-growing employment sectors in the United States — those types of low-paying jobs have grown at a much slower pace in Wisconsin.

Manufacturing is one of the few areas where Wisconsin has outperformed the nation in terms of job growth for more than a decade.

Those trends continued in the latest 12-month period, said Matthew Sigelman, chief executive officer at Burning Glass Technologies, an independent labor-market research group based in Boston.

"The biggest gaps between Wisconsin and nation are in a lot of service sector and retail-type employment areas, which tend to be lower paying and lower income and lower social mobility," Sigelman said after analyzing the quarterly census data.

Through June, Wisconsin was so slow in generating leisure and hospitality jobs, such as waiters and hotel clerks, that the state ranked 44th, with a growth rate of 0.9%. The retail sector, which includes cashiers and Walmart greeters, added jobs at a 0.9% pace in Wisconsin compared with 1.9% in the nation.

Nor is the state's laggard pace always a negative attribute, said Sigelman, whose firm currently has a contract with the State of Wisconsin to develop a jobs database that's meant to help match job seekers and employers.

"It's not clear that having lower-than-average job growth in hospitality is going to be terribly detrimental to an economy or even necessarily where you want your growth to be," he said. Low-wage service sector jobs seldom offer very much income mobility, he said.

In manufacturing, however, Wisconsin matched the national average with a 1.2% job-creation rate that ranked the state in the middle at 27th.

On the south side of Milwaukee, Packaging Solutions Inc. says its fortunes are tied directly to the manufacturing economy. The privately held company makes reusable custom crates that are meant to ship fenders, hoods and other parts from suppliers to final assembly plants. It works for the likes of Harley-Davidson Inc., John Deere & Co. and engine-maker Mercury Marine.

"We've stayed pretty busy," said Packaging Solutions president Bill Davies. "Our business has been steady for the last several years."

Since the worst days of the recession, when the company had only 24 production workers and engineers, it now is up to 37, a figure that doesn't include management and marketing.

In terms of private-sector job creation — including all nongovernment, non-farm jobs — Wisconsin continues to lag most of its Midwestern peer states. Wisconsin's 12-month growth rate of 1.5% ranked it behind Michigan (2.7%), Indiana (1.8%), Iowa (1.8%), Illinois (1.6%), Minnesota (1.6%) and Ohio (1.6%).