Wyoming adds jobs, but still not at full recovery

November 8, 2022

SVI/WNE: Wyoming continues to add jobs, just not enough to completely recover from losses incurred during a much-earlier period of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, newly released state figures show. From the second quarter of last year to 2022’s same quarter, Wyoming added 5,118 jobs, a gain of 1.9% to a total of more than 272,000, one of the newly posted online charts shows.

Payrolls rose by a much greater portion, up 8.3% to some $3.7 billion. “Despite the recent job growth, employment has not fully returned to pre pandemic levels,” noted an email Friday from the Department of Workforce Services’ Research and Planning office. “Total employment in second quarter 2022 was down approximately 6,300 jobs from second quarter 2019.”

What Wyoming employers paid their staff grew by a much larger portion than total employment, amid high inflation.

From April through June, the mining, oil and gas sector added some 1,594 positions, an 11% gain to a total of just over 16,000, per the newly issued data contained in another online chart. That’s down from close to 20,000 mining workers in the first quarter of 2020, mostly before the pandemic started drastically impacting the U.S.; the last quarter of 2019 had more than 20,000. Other big gainers of employees year-over-year in the second quarter were leisure and hospitality, a 4.1% increase; retail trade, up 2.8%, and “professional & business services,” with a 3.8% rise.

Retail trade employed some 30,000-plus people in the state, a gain of about 7% from the first quarter of 2020. Some government and related employers had fewer workers in this year’s second quarter than they had a year earlier. State government shed 2.7% of its positions, for just over 12,000 people total, for instance.