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Wood
County's total employment, based upon a household survey, rose by 2.4 percent
from a year ago. Total employment, generated from a survey of business
firms, declined by 0.2 percent from a year ago. This discrepancy may
indicate a structural change in the economy; a movement in employment toward
smaller firms and the self employed may be taking place. These types of
activity are not as likely to show up in the survey of business firms.
Other variables in the report show that paper manufacturing employment has
fallen in the state. However, public assistance and unemployment claim
data show some improvement taking place locally. Weekly earnings have been
rising as of late. Lastly, the employment level in the area is trending
upwards.
Wood
county nonfarm employment numbers are given in Table 7.
Total nonfarm employment is estimated to have fallen by 0.2 percent over the
past twelve months, or by 100 jobs. Difficulty in the manufacturing sector
was the biggest drag on employment growth. Manufacturing is estimated to
have contracted by 500 positions. Thus, nonfarm employment would have
registered an increase of 400 positions if we excluded this troubled sector.
Total nonfarm employment in Wood now stands at 44.6 thousand jobs.
Figure
1 presents a graph showing Wisconsin employment in paper manufacturing.
Employment in this sector peaked in mid 1997 at around 52 thousand jobs.
Since that time employment has been trending downward and now stands at around
40 thousand people. A soft economy, international competition, and gains
in productivity have had a major impact on this important industrial sector.
Table
8 presents the help wanted advertising index for Wisconsin Rapids. Since
this is our first report for the area there is no number from last year to
compare this year's figure. However, we do have a base year comparison.
The index of 118 means there has been an 18 percent increase in the number of
positions being advertised when compared to the base year. The U.S. index
is considerably below its base year period. The mark of 40 means that the
number of positions is only 40 percent of the base year number for the country.
Public
assistance claim data are presented in Table 9. Public assistance on a
monthly county wide average basis remained unchanged from a year ago.
Another measure of local family distress are unemployment claims, which are
presented in table 10. On a weekly average basis new claims fell from 299
to 194 or by 35.1 percent over the course of the year. Likewise total
claims receded from 1,908 to 1,623 or by almost 15 percent from 2003. Thus
the unemployment claim data seem to suggest that there has been improvement in
these figures. Hopefully this is signaling that people are finding
employment opportunities rather than having their benefits running out.
Figure
2 shows Wisconsin average weekly earning in paper and allied products
manufacturing. Average weekly earnings peaked in mid 2001 at around $875
per week. The latest data suggests that by 2003 the figure declined to
about $825 on a weekly average basis. The data are indicative of the tough
times faced by this industrial sector. However, there has been an upward
and encouraging trend in this figure over the past year.
Figure 3 presents the employment level in Wood County and how it has trended
over a past number of years. Most importantly it has been moving upward
over the year. Figure 4 gives the other side of the picture, the movements
in the unemployment level in Wood County. Finally Figure 5 and
Figure 6
display the historical fluctuations in the Wood county unemployment rate and the
labor force respectively. Thus Figure 3 through 6 give a nice overview of
how these major economic variables have performed over the past decade.
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