‘Mining’ for Best City Labor Markets, U.S. and Canada

As the U.S. and Canadian economies recover from horrific coronavirus-induced slides last year, it’s interesting to observe where, among cities, the pace is quickening most resoundingly.

Tables 1 and 2 present relatively easy-to-understand assessments of city labor markets.

Each table features side-by-side rankings of cities according to year-over-year number of jobs changes (from fastest to slowest) and unemployment rates (lowest or tightest to highest or most severe).

Table 1 is a condensed version of the whole data set for America’s 51 largest (by population) cities that appears at the end of this article. It has been shortened to the top 33 cities according to both criteria (jobs growth and U rate) for ease of posting to social media.

For Canada, Table 2 includes all 35 of the nation’s Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs).

By the way, the latest available U.S. numbers are for June; for Canada, the coverage is through July. Sometimes Canadian data is a month ahead; but there are instances when it’s the other way around (e.g., retail sales statistics).

In Table 1, beige-colored highlighting shines a spotlight on the two U.S. cities that are among the Top 10 for both rapid jobs growth and low unemployment rates. According to this methodology, Raleigh and Detroit currently possess the Top Tier labor markets among America’s major cities.

The blue shading picks out another four cites warranting special acknowledgement because they are among the Top 10 on one side of the chart, but they have fallen just short of making it into the upper echelon on the other side.

The four cities making up the second tier of best U.S. labor markets are Salt Lake City, Boston, Nashville and Austin.

The labour market in Las Vegas has a remarkable story to tell. Neon City is number one for year-over-year jobs growth, +12.8%, but it’s dead last (i.e., in 51^st position) for unemployment rate, 9.6%. The entertainment industry is on the comeback trail, but the drop in number of jobs this time last year was so deep, there’s remains a lot of ascending to do to climb out of the crater.

Table 1

Adopting the same methodology to assess Canadian city labour markets, the two top tier cities (with green shading) presently are Abbotsford and Regina.

Additionally, there are five cities (with brown shading) that make up a second-or next-best tier ̶ Peterborough, Victoria, Trois-Rivière, Kitchener and Ottawa-Gatineau.

Table 2

‘Composite’ Ranking Shines Spotlight on Boston and Vancouver

Admittedly, most of the cites performing best in Tables 1 and 2 are not among the largest population centers in either country.

Therefore, an additional ‘composite’ ranking proves useful. The composite ranking calculates the average of the jobs growth and U-rate rankings for each city and, in turn, places that number in an ordering from lowest to highest.

According to the ‘composite’ approach, the labor markets of the 12 most populous urban centers in the U.S. are led by Boston (ranked 4^th out of 51), followed by Atlanta (7^th spot out of 51), Philadelphia (24^th), New York (26^th), Dallas-Ft Worth and Phoenix (tied for 29^th position), Washington D.C. (33^rd), San Francisco (41^st), Los Angeles (42^nd), Miami (43^rd), Chicago (48^th) and Houston (50^th).

Canada’s major urban and labour market hubs have Vancouver in the vanguard (7^th out of 35), with Ottawa-Gatineau (9^th) next in line; then come Montreal (13^th), Edmonton (18^th), Toronto (22^nd) and Calgary (28^th).

And let’s put the full U.S. table, for all 51 cities, at the end.

Category: ConstructConnect

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 12th, 2021 at 12:39 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.