Blog Post

AEIdeas

The Texas Workforce Commission released state employment data today for the month of December, and job growth in the Lone Star State continues to lead, and in fact carry the nation’s improving labor market as the chart above shows. Here are some highlights of the December employment report for Texas:

1. Texas ended the year with the state’s largest ever year-over-year payroll gain with the eye-popping addition of 457,900 new jobs between December 2013 and December 2014. That’s more than 1,700 new payroll jobs that were added every business day last year in the Lone Star State, and 220 new jobs every business hour or almost 4 new jobs added every minute!

2. In just the last month of December, which marked the 51st consecutive month of employment growth, Texas added 45,700 new payroll jobs, which was more than 2,000 jobs every business day, almost 260 jobs every hour, and more than 4 new jobs every minute! The strong job growth in December brought the state’s jobless rate down to 4.6%, the lowest Texas unemployment rate since May 2008.

3. Total December employment in the Lone Star State reached a new record high of 12.45 million workers (11.783 million nonfarm payroll jobs and another 667,000 self-employed and farm workers), which was above the December 2007 level by 1,444,290 jobs (and by 13.1%), see chart above. In contrast, total employment at the end of the year in the rest of the country (US minus Texas) still remained 275,290 jobs below the pre-recession, December 2007 level (see chart above).

It’s a pretty impressive story of how job creation in just one state – Texas – has made such a significant contribution to the 1.169 million net increase in total US employment (+1,444,290 Texas jobs minus the 275,290 non-Texas job loss) in the seven year period between the start of the Great Recession in December 2007 and December 2014. The other 49 states and the District of Columbia together employ about 275,000 fewer Americans than at the start of the recession seven years ago, while the Lone Star State has added more than 1.25 million payroll jobs and more than 190,000 non-payroll jobs (primarily self-employed and farm workers).

And while the oil and gas boom has certainly contributed to making Texas the nation’s No. 1 job creating state by far, the job gains in the Lone Star State have been pretty broadly based across many different sectors and industries. In percentage terms, the 11.5% payroll job gain in the “mining and logging” sector led the state’s 11 industries for job growth last year as that sector added 4,900 new jobs in 2014. An even greater absolute number of new jobs – 47,500 – were added in the state’s booming construction industry, which grew by 7.7% last year. As one example that highlights the construction boom in Texas, there were more permits for single-family homes issued last year through November in just one Texas city – Houston (34,566) – than in the entire state of California (34,035) over the same period. Other sectors with job growth last year above the state’s average payroll increase of 4% include financial activities (+5.1% and +34,800 new jobs) and professional and business services (+5.8% and +85,800 new jobs).

Bottom Line: Texas clearly deserves the title of America’s “economic miracle state.” It’s the most important energy-producing state in the US, and now produces so much crude oil that the state’s daily production of more than 3 million barrels represents more than 37% of the nation’s crude oil and would rank the Lone Star State as the world’s sixth largest oil producer as a separate country. Along with the gusher of shale oil and gas in Texas has come a gusher of more than 1.44 million new jobs since the start of the Great Recession, while the rest of the US hasn’t even yet recovered all of the non-Texas jobs lost during the recession, and employs 275,000 fewer people than in December 2007. Without the strong support of the Texas job machine and without the economic stimulus of the perfectly-timed shale revolution, the Great Recession would have been much longer and more severe, and the current US economic recovery and job market would be much weaker than it is today. Simply put, “Saudi Texas” is the shining star of The Great American Shale Boom, and the American state at the forefront of the US economic recovery.

Update: Employment data for Texas is here, and for US here.