The Baltimore Sun, By Jamie Smith Hopkins.
Maryland employers added nearly 25,000 jobs last year, according to new estimates - the best performance since 2006, but one that still leaves the state with more than 80,000 jobs to make up, given the recession's losses. At this rate of employment growth, it will take Maryland until 2015 to dig out of the job-loss hole. Getting back to a truly normal employment situation would take even longer because population growth calls for the constant creation of new jobs. Economist Richard Clinch thinks Marylanders shouldn't count on faster job growth this year because efforts to rein in the federal budget are rippling through the state's sizable base of government contractors. Unmanned aircraft maker AAI said Tuesday that it was immediately laying off 184 of its 1,650 workers in the Hunt Valley area to prepare for leaner times. "The question is ... what is going to replace the federal government as the driver of the Maryland economy?" asked Clinch, director of economic research at the University of Baltimore's Jacob France Institute. A gain of 25,000 jobs in a year is "not a robust recovery," he said. Still, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates released Tuesday suggest that the state's job market did make progress last year. Maryland employers had 24,700 more workers on their payrolls in December than they did a year earlier, compared with a 4,400-job gain in 2010 and a 67,000-job loss in 2009, when the recession officially ended. The job figures, drawn from surveys, are preliminary. They could be substantially changed - up or down - when the labor agency incorporates additional employment information with its annual "benchmark" revisions in March. As things stand now, almost 90 percent of the jobs added last year were in the private sector, the Labor Department estimated. Education and health services - a key sector for Maryland, with its major hospitals - was the biggest gainer. Those employers accounted for 10,000 of the new jobs. . . . Click
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