U.S. Labor Dept.: NM lost jobs at end of 2014
Updated: 01/27/2015 5:45 PM | Created: 01/27/2015 5:06 PM
By: Stuart Dyson, KOB Eyewitness News 4
For months, New Mexico’s struggling economy has slowly been adding jobs, but now, the U.S. Department of Labor says we hit a streak of job losses at the end of 2014.
Usually we take the long view with the monthly numbers, a year-to-year look, from December 2013 to December 2014. Those numbers show about 13,500 new jobs were created during that twelve-month period.
But New Mexico was among the national leaders in jobs lost in just one month, from November 2014 to December 2014. We’re talking 1,600 jobs, most of them in the federal category of “Trade, Transportation, Utilities.” That would include the state’s oil fields, where slumping oil prices have already led to layoffs.
“The thing about it is, a one month drop-off, particularly at that time of the year, can be worrisome,” said state Sen. Stuart Ingle of Portales, floor leader of the Senate Republicans. “I think what’s happened is that a lot of those jobs are in the oil field, and from what I understand, they’re cutting way back on the amount of overtime that they had people doing. They’re laying off a lot of truck drivers.”
State lawmakers are considering a bewildering variety of different bills aimed at job creation, but one of them is aimed at the state government itself. The state spends billions on all kinds of contract work, and right now about 80 percent of it goes to out-of-state contractors. Sen. Michael Padilla of Albuquerque has a bill that would change that in a hurry.
” What this legislation is designed to do is to make sure that at a minimum, one-third of all state contracts go to New Mexico businesses,” Padilla said. “This is going to create jobs overnight here in the state of New Mexico.”
Those federal numbers did contain some good news – the state’s unemployment rate dropped to 6.1 percent in December, down from 6.4 percent in November and 6.6 percent in December of 2013.