Number of Minnesotans employed falls again in January, sixth monthly fall out of the last seven
Minnesota’s media is reporting that the state added 14,100 new jobs in January. What is being reported somewhat less is that the number of Minnesotans actually employed fell by 423. As Figure 1 shows, January was the sixth month out of the last seven that the number of Minnesotans employed has fallen and there are now 10,716 fewer Minnesotans employed than there were in June.
Figure 1: Monthly change in the number of jobs and people employed in Minnesota, 2022
If you have been following this, you may note that this is a considerable improvement on the fall of 38,724 from June to December 2022 which I noted in January. This is down to revisions in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data for the number of people employed. Nevertheless, this is not good news given that our state’s Labor Force participation rate – 68.1% for January – remains below the level of December 2019, 70.7%.