How high unemployment changed where Rhode Islanders work
March 1st, 2013 at 11:35 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main Site
There was welcome news on Thursday that Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is now below 10% for the first time in nearly four years. But the Great Recession had a huge impact on where the jobs are in the state.
The only industry that added a significant number of employees from 2007 through 2012 was education and health services, which is primarily nonprofit and heavily dependent on government subsidies, and which added 5,700 jobs. By contrast manufacturing – which started with half as many jobs as education and health to begin with – was still down by 11,600 jobs as of December.
Here’s a chart showing the change in total Rhode Island employment by industry:
And here’s a more granular look that breaks out some of those large categories into smaller ones. Health care and social services, for example, employs the bulk of folks in the Education & Health Services sector above, while retail is the primary employer in the Trade, Transportation & Utilities category:
Tags: economy, employment, jobs, unemployment
Nesi's Notes covers politics and the economy in and around Rhode Island for WPRI.com. (Twitter: 
I know 3 businesses that recently closed down, how is the unemployment going down???
Look at the dates, this is prob numbers from the seasonal hiring
[...] Related: How high unemployment changed where Rhode Islanders work (March 1) Tags: economy, employment, employment-population ratio, jobs, population, [...]
What does Nesi mean when he says the chart offers a “more granular look” at the job situation. Just this week there was a story floating around the web — I believe it was on Boston.com — about idiotic phrase was on the list. It means absolutely nothing, but here’s Nesi tossing it out there