Texas sluggish on jobs, but energy hiring up
America had a bumper crop of jobs in February, but Texas got a tiny slice of the total, dimming prospects for robust employment growth in 2017.
The state’s workforce expanded by 6,700 jobs last month, a smallerthan-usual fraction of the 235,000 added nationwide and much reduced from Texas’ own performance in January. The unemployment rate crept up, to 4.9 percent, leading the Dallas Federal Reserve to revise its employment growth expectations to 2.3 percent for the year, down from 2.7 percent.
The depressed oil and gas sector was a bright spot in February, adding 3,400 jobs, or 1.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, the numbers released Friday show. That’s the fifth straight month of growth in the industry and brings the 2017 total to 5,300 net new positions.
Still, Texas is more than 100,000 mining jobs below the sector’s peak employment at the end of 2014, and even industry jubilation about regulatory rollbacks
coming from Washington won’t spur robust hiring until oil prices rise further.
“It’s a slow enough recovery that while the optimism plays a role in terms of hiring, the economics themselves are the bigger player there,” said Karr Ingham, an Amarillo-based economist for the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers.
According to Janette Marx, chief operating officer of the global recruitment firm Airswift, oil and gas employers are hiring primarily technical employees for automation, instrumentation, design and engineering roles, rather than laborers. Workers are still relatively easy to find, as so many remain out of work or are willing to leave the lower-wage jobs they accepted after being laid off.
“At this point we’re still able to identify the talent,” Marx said. “We foresee in the future that it will be very difficult, and we’ll have an acute shortage in this area.”
Those statewide oil and gas jobs aren’t coming back yet in Houston. But government payrolls picked up locally, and manufacturing added more jobs than any February on record, responding to recovering demand from the oil field as well as a weakening dollar that has made U.S. products more attractive to buyers overseas.
“Honestly, it’s tough to find unemployed candidates for manufacturing jobs, because it’s picked up so much,” said Amber Watts, Houston branch manager for the staffing and recruitment agency Robert Half.
Although many oil and gas employees remain out of work, they can’t easily just switch industries.
“I think companies are starting to open up a little bit, but they want to see individuals with a manufacturing background, not an oil and gas background,” Watts said.
Construction employment also ticked up, although it might be a blip; the sector has been trending down in recent months as residential real estate remains overbuilt and the boom of petrochemical construction in east Houston winds down. The sector is still down 5,800 jobs from its most recent peak in October 2015.
That brings Houston’s annual growth rate from 0.1 percent in January to 0.6 percent last month. The unemployment rate locally stands at 5.9 percent, a full point above the national average and its level in Houston a year ago.
Statewide, Texas’ job growth rate remained steady at 1.9 percent over the year. Education and health services, leisure and hospitality, and the manufacturing sectors led this month’s seasonally adjusted job growth, while government and trade, transportation and utilities sustained heavy losses.