Jobs in manufacturing – those that build up and keep the state's middle class healthy and contributing to the state's financial solvency – continue to lag in Illinois.
In a mailing to interested parties last Friday, Mischa Fisher, Sr. Economist & Data Scientist, State of Illinois wrote:
Last month, Illinois (briefly) surpassed the level of payrolls it had in September of 2000 by a fraction of a percent. Given the virtually identical number of jobs in the Illinois economy between the two points in time, it provides a rare opportunity to compare industry composition levels without any sort of scaling factor.
The above graphic show the decline in manufacturing jobs over the intervening decade and a half (~35%) in absolute terms and as a share of the total workforce. This is of course part of a larger global trend, however, Illinois’s structural hurdles have made the problem far worse than it otherwise would have been.
