Jobless rate hit 5% in January

Figure is best level seen since 2008

The economic recovery advanced into January as Wisconsin’s unemployment rate declined to a preliminary 5%, down from 5.2% in December and 6% in January 2014.

Thursday’s monthly estimates from the state Department of Workforce Development show the state’s unemployment rate hovering at the best levels since August 2008, about a month before the financial market meltdown in that year triggered a brutal global downturn. In the worst months of the last recession, the state jobless rate peaked at 9.2% in 2009 and 2010.

The state appears to be tracking the national recovery, now in its fifth year. On Thursday, the state agency said Wisconsin gained 44,900 private-sector jobs from December 2013 to December 2014 — the highest 12-month December-to-December increase since 1999. That parallels the national trend in the same 12-month period, when U.S. employers capped the best year for job growth since the tech-boom year of 1999.

Separately in Thursday’s report, Wisconsin gained an estimated 300 private-sector jobs in the one-month period from December to January.

January’s gains, however, are too small to be statistically meaningful. The state’s preliminary estimates are based on surveys of businesses that use small sample sizes and routinely are off by several hundred jobs every month, if not several thousand.

That monthly margin of error was made clear Thursday because the latest state report follows an annual process of revisions of monthly data for most of 2014 and parts of 2013.

The retroactive revisions reveal that preliminary monthly estimates routinely understate gains, as they did last April, when preliminary estimates showed a gain of 7,600 private-sector jobs. That was revised to a gain of 8,000 under the revisions supplied Thursday. Monthly numbers also routinely understate losses, as they did in February 2014, when preliminary estimates showed a loss of 1,600, which was later revised to a far deeper loss of 5,300 private-sector jobs.

In its statement, however, the state agency also singled out the number of jobs created since the start of the first term of Gov. Scott Walker, who took office in January 2011. According to the agency, the state added 139,000 private-sector jobs since December 2010, the month before Walker took office.