TRENTON- Though the most recent monthly statistics show that New Jersey reached an all-time high for employment, the state is still producing fewer jobs than are needed to keep up with the growth in the working age population.

Since the recession started in March 2001, job growth in New Jersey has been 1.7 percent while the working age population has grown by 3.2 percent. If job growth since the recession began had just kept up with working-age population growth, New Jersey would have over 60,000 more jobs than it has now.

The data now available through September also shows New Jersey to be short of the number of jobs that supporters of federal income tax cuts projected. The president's Council of Economic Advisers predicted the tax cuts would create 5.5 million jobs in the U.S. by the end of this year. So far the total is nearly 2.9 million below that. Achieving the predicted level of job growth in New Jersey would have meant 134,400 new jobs by now. Through September, New Jersey is 40,700 jobs short.

To hit the federal target, New Jersey would have to gain over 22,500 jobs per month on average for the remaining three months of the year. The job gain in September was 12,000. While jobs increased the most in the trade/transportation/utilities sector, the manufacturing sector had the biggest decrease. Ironically, even though the state has gained a total of 67,900 jobs since the recession started, 68,300 manufacturing jobs have been lost in this time period. That's a decline of 16.5 percent in the manufacturing industry.

Although the unemployment rate remained the same at 4.8 percent, that's still 209,800 New Jerseyans who are unemployed and looking for jobs. And this is during a time when a record number of jobless workers in the U.S., over 3 million, "have exhausted their regular benefits, gone without federal aid, and received neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check," according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Also according to this study, New Jersey ranks fifth in the number of individuals, 146,000, who have exhausted their regular benefits and have gone without federal aid. And close to 22 percent of the unemployed in the U.S. have been out of work 27 weeks or more.

New Jersey has a ways to go before it has covered even the number of jobs needed to support the growing working-age population of this state and has begun to address the plight of the unemployed.

For more on JobWatch, go to http://www.jobwatch.org. The JobWatch analysis takes into account differences that can be expected among states in terms of job creation. EPI uses state-by-state employment forecasts of Economy.com, a leading forecaster of regional economics. Economy.com provides employment projections for each state for the fourth quarter of 2002 to the fourth quarter of 2004. Using this data, EPI calculated each state's share of the total employment growth and applied it to the projected 306,000-jobs-per month growth rate to calculate how much employment growth each state should experience if the federal government's employment projects were realized. That works out to an average of 9,000 new jobs per month for New Jersey.

Economic Policy Institute's JobWatch tracks current trends in the U.S. labor market and offers up-to-date readings on its status. New Jersey Policy Perspective is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts research and analysis aimed at providing information to help inform debate in New Jersey.

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