This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Rick Henderson, managing editor of Carolina Journal.
RALEIGH — A week from today, Oct. 21, Gov. Bev Perdue and her liberal allies may be in a pickle. When the state’s Employment Security Commission issues its employment report for September, there’s a reasonable chance it will show minor losses in government jobs — or perhaps even a slight gain. Such an announcement would make a mockery of the tales of woe the governor and her colleagues on the left have been spinning over the past several months.
Since it became clear the Republican majority in the General Assembly would allow Perdue’s temporary sales tax increase to expire at the end of June, the governor, other Democratic elected officials, and various left-leaning pundits have warned of massive public-sector job cuts. In April, Perdue hinted at as many as 30,000 layoffs in government — 18,000 of them in local education. State Senate Minority Leader Martin Nesbitt, D-Buncombe, echoed Perdue’s claim. The liberal N.C. Budget & Tax Center projected nearly 20,000 public-sector job losses.
Meantime, a report issued this week by the Pew Charitable Foundation’s Center for the States found that North Carolina lost 25,000 state and local government jobs from July 2008 to August 2011 — a 3.6 percent reduction in public employment. (Perdue and her liberal friends may not want to make too much of these results. If you limit the search by one month, from July 2008 to July 2011 — when Democrats controlled the General Assembly and the Executive Mansion — state and local government jobs plummeted by 37,100. It’s as if public-sector hiring surged by nearly 12,000 when the GOP grabbed the purse strings!)
Will the governor be vindicated? Using the September national employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a guide, we may see some reductions in the government work force, but probably not the frightening levels of job cuts Perdue and her colleagues have forecast. For one thing, recent BLS reports have not shown a massive loss of government jobs across the country. And since North Carolina is home to only 3 percent of U.S. population, the relatively small job cuts nationally should not translate into big losses here.
Moreover, ESC, the Pew Center, the media, Perdue, and other public commentators lean heavily on BLS “seasonally adjusted” estimates of employment, and these estimates may not report actual employment reliably. Seasonal adjustment is nothing more than a guess of what the labor force in education (for instance) should look like year-round if there were no summer vacation; teacher jobs aren’t counted when teachers aren’t in the classroom. (ESC acts as the local agent for BLS and relies on the federal agency’s methods and definitions.)
In recent months, those estimates have shown North Carolina government payrolls on the rise. June’s report placed total state and local employment (seasonally adjusted) at 612,800 jobs. By August, that figure had climbed to 616,400. Democrats have assured us this is impossible. But given quirks and oddities in the seasonal adjustment method, it’s quite plausible that the September ESC report will show an upswing in government hiring. And the left can’t abandon its use of seasonally adjusted figures without looking like hypocrites.
By contrast, the not seasonally adjusted (or unadjusted) job counts from BLS show state and local government jobs nationally falling by 289,000 from September 2010 to September 2011 — from 19,223,000 last year to 18,934,000 this year. September is a solid benchmark, as it’s the first full month of the school year, when government employment should be at or near its annual peak.
Unless the Tar Heel State suffered a wildly disproportionate loss of government jobs over the past year (much more than our 3 percent share of the U.S. population), the state should expect to lose slightly less than 10,000 government jobs. Not 20,000 or 30,000. Local government education accounted for 150,000 of the job losses nationally, so our share of the local school reductions should be more like 4,500, rather than the 18,000 Perdue predicted.
The actual job losses in local education may be much lower than that. In August, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction surveyed school districts across the state, asking them to list all the workers they have eliminated since the previous school year ended. With all but two of the 115 districts responding, DPI reported a “reduction in force” of 2,418 K-12 jobs, 534 of them teachers. (According to DPI’s website, public school systems have 541 open positions.) If the DPI report is accurate, there appear to be about 2,000 fewer jobs in K-12 education — including teachers, teacher assistants, support staff, administration, food service, maintenance and facilities, etc. — than at this time a year ago.
It’s possible that ESC’s September report will show another seasonally adjusted increase in government employment, or it could show a dip. The unadjusted numbers should provide a more reliable measure of public staffing, as those figures come from an actual survey of schools, universities, and the like.
To be sure, there could be local variations. Some states may fare significantly better or worse than others. North Carolina may be an outlier. But if I were a betting man, I would wager a substantial sum of money that the ESC will report government job losses that are nowhere near 18,000, let alone 30,000.