K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Public & Private Sector Employment Changes

Donald J. Boyd and Lucy Dadayan

Earlier this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released state-by-state employment data for the month of June. While national totals had already been released for June, this is the first look at June data for individual states. The national data had shown a very slight increase in private sector employment, compared with May, and slight continued declines in state and local government employment (see Figure 1). This is broadly consistent with past recessions, in which state and local government employment has been far more stable than private sector employment, and in fact rarely declined at all. As in past recessions, state and local government employment changes tend to lag responses in the private sector.