A reader brings my attention to John Schmid’s article documenting the Wisconsin employment slowdown, relying on the Census of Quarterly Employment and Wages, for the year ending December 2016.

From the article:

• Wisconsin added 11,590 private-sector jobs, lagging job creation gains in every other year of the current upswing, which ranged from a low of 29,723 in 2013 to a high of 38,077 in 2015.
  
• The state’s overall 2016 hiring gains amounted to an increase of only 0.5%, well under half the typical rate, which ranged from 1.3% in 2011 and 2013 to 1.6% in 2014 and 2015.
  
• Average weekly private-sector wages in the state declined 0.6% last year, led by a 5.3% plunge in manufacturing wages.
  
• Manufacturers lost 3,776 jobs in the 12-month period, which amounts to a 0.8% decline in employment in the sector.
  

Here’s the reported figures:


Figure 1: Wisconsin Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages series for private employment (black), and seasonally adjusted using ARIMA X-13 (red). Source: DWD and author’s calculations.

And here are the seasonally adjusted series for private nonfarm payroll employment, including the establishment survey based series.

Figure 2: BLS series on private nonfarm payroll employment (blue), and seasonally adjusted Wisconsin Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages series for private employment (red). Light orange shading denotes establishment series data that do not reflect benchmarking to QCEW. Source: BLS, DWD and author’s calculations.

Note that while the establishment survey numbers have surged over the past few months, these are not benchmarked to the Census numbers.

From the article:

Wisconsin Department of Revenue chief economist John Koskinen said he’s not worried about a slowdown.

The Philadelphia Fed coincident index does not suggest a recession, but rather acceleration in the past few months, although it is based in part on data from the same establishment survey.