Employment by Industry Through May 2019

The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a dismal employment report for May with the U.S. economy seeing a net gain of just 75,000 nonfarm jobs. Last month, 90,000 jobs were created in the private sector while government lost 15,000 positions. To put these figures in perspective, they should be considered over a longer time frame, however.

Table 1 breaks total employment down into service and goods-producing industries and then into private and government employees. Most of the goods-producing employees work in manufacturing and construction, and the components of these two sectors of most relevance to steel people are broken out in Table 1.