Traditional jobs too few for statisticians to count

Stop the presses. As of this month, “printer” and “screen printer” are no longer official jobs — at least as far as the US Labour Department’s flagship release is concerned. The same goes for “printing support” jobs such as platemaking and prepress work.

Each year, the Bureau of Labour Statistics takes stock of industries that have become too small to be counted as a separate category in the database accompanying its widely watched monthly report on US non-farm payrolls.

Last year we lost “hardwood and softwood veneer and plywood manufacturing,” as well as “fibre, yarn and thread mills”. “Leather and allied products” got the axe the year before that, as did “directory and mailing-list publishers”. Together these minor database moves symbolise substantial shifts in the economy.

The Labour Department can’t allow any industry in the data to shrink so much that it could be used to identify a specific company, says John Stewart, supervisory economist at the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS).

Companies provide the BLS with detailed data on employment and wages. In exchange, the BLS goes to enormous lengths to avoid publishing corporate trade secrets.

The broad sector that includes printing has shed about a third of its jobs since the start of the Great Recession — more than every sector but clothing manufacturing. (Commercial printing doesn’t include print newspapers, which have their own problems.)

Printing workers are squeezed by falling demand — Americans don’t mail as many cards or hand out as many brochures as they once did. At the same time, supply has soared as advances in printing technology allow companies to churn out more goods with fewer workers.

The industry’s large players have advanced at warp speed, adopting hulking high-tech printers that require little human input.

Many smaller printers have been unable to keep up. Workers who entered the industry decades ago as ink-stained apprentices are now choosing to retire rather than keep up with the high-tech arms race — a phenomenon reflected in the industry’s steadily shrinking jobs numbers.

The Labour Department’s annual payroll data purge isn’t funereal, just a fact of life. Jobs are always being created, even as old ones join “carpet and rug mills” and “small electronic appliance manufacturing” in the government’s electronic dustbin. In the case of printing, job losses have been replaced by enormous gains in internet-related categories.

And occasionally, the Labour Department brings a new series into the world, but it’s harder to add an industry to the report than it is to subtract one. “Once you’ve put a series out there, it’s extremely hard to take back,” Stewart says.