Loyal Augusta Business Daily reader, Zach Kelehear asked me an interesting question last week about the monthly change in employment over the last year. Here is the data again:
Kelehear asked, “The three months that showed drops in employment are interesting to consider…. The “Why” is at the heart of my curiosity, and are these months typically, historically, low employment months.”
So, I dug back into the data that goes back to 1990, and here are the results:
All months, except April, have shown increases in employment over the last 25 years. Generally, the highest monthly increases are seen in May and June and the smallest in October and December.
April is interesting because there is a big golf tournament held here every year, so why does employment fall? First, the Masters was not held in April 2020 because of Covid, but even accounting for that, the average change in employment in April is a loss of 94 jobs. Second, the data presented is seasonally adjusted. Unseasonally adjusted data shows employment increasing in April, so what the data for 2024 is saying is that employment is not increasing as much as expected. I know that some restaurants, for example, fast casual that rely on lunchtime traffic, see a decrease in customers in Masters week and employ fewer staff. As hospitality for the Masters changes, from the Augusta National themselves, to corporations bringing in outside caterers, maybe local employment is not increasing as much as it used to.
Of the other months Kelehear mentions, the November fall is easy to associate with Hurricane Helene. The February numbers are harder to associate with a particular event. I went back over my ABD reports, and nothing was indicated. Local economic numbers are more variable than national numbers, and we get some months that are just off-trend.
