Whatever Friday's monthly jobs report says, it won't change the big picture. There are roughly 137 million jobs in this country. About two-thirds of those jobs are in private-sector services; the remaining third are split between goods-producing jobs (mainly manufacturing and construction) and government work (mostly at the state and local level).
Here's a closer look, drawn from the same data that the government collects for the monthly jobs report. (You can see this data, in glorious detail, here.)
One thing this graph doesn't show is change over time. Over the past several years, the job market has (obviously) been pretty grim. The recession ended four and a half years ago, in June 2009. But there are still 1.3 million fewer U.S. jobs than there were in December 2007, when the recession began.
Still, when you look more closely, the picture is more nuanced. Since the recession started in December 2007:
- Health care has added 1.5 million jobs.
- Restaurants and bars have added roughly 700,000 jobs.
- The number of construction jobs has fallen by 1.6 million.
- The number of manufacturing jobs has fallen by 1.7 million.
- The number of government jobs has fallen by about 500,000.
For more on jobs lost and gained since the recession — and on average wages in different sectors — see our post Where The Jobs Are (And Aren't).
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