If you follow economic data, you know that the first Friday of every month is “jobs report Friday.”

That’s the day the national employment numbers for the preceding month are released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The job growth number and associated unemployment rate are perhaps the most-followed monthly economic statistics.

In June 2014, the U.S. economy finally reached the employment numbers that existed in late 2007 before the start of the Great Recession. The numbers in August showed an increase of about 354,000 jobs from two months earlier.

This represents growth of about 1.8 percent per year, as can be seen in the chart below. It’s much better than the 5 percent per year job loss rate that we saw in the depths of the recession. But it’s not as strong as job growth following economic recoveries from past recessions.

Given the severity of the downturn, we would have needed a much stronger rebound in order to recover the jobs that were lost.

Contrast this to the recovery from the 1990-91 recession. The recession itself was much shorter, lasting only six months, and during that recovery, the economy gained jobs at a rate that seemed to settle at about 2.5 percent annually.

The phenomenon of slower employment recovery has become a fact of economic life in the U.S. over the last four decades.

Part of the job growth slowdown is driven by changing demographics. The Baby Boomers are leaving the workforce and this slows the natural rate of employment growth.

A larger phenomenon is the increasing pace of technology growth that allows businesses to spend less on labor. Another driver is the falling cost of international shipping, driven mostly by containerization of cargoes. This shipping method, in which products are packaged typically at the factory, into standardized 20 or 40-foot containers that can then travel via ship, train, or truck, has made it substantially cheaper to bring in goods from abroad.

These factors influence how many people choose to seek work and also how much labor is demanded by businesses in order to produce any particular amount of output that they think they could sell. These factors, along with others, have changed the number of jobs generated by the economy at the national and local level.

Sept. 19, 2014 was the third Friday of the month. As on any third Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released nonfarm payroll numbers for the more than 360 metro areas in the U.S. August 2014 is up about 1,200 jobs for the two-county Pensacola metro area compared to August 2013.

The same trends that drive growth rates in the national economy can be seen in the local economy. The estimated 163,499 jobs in 2014 represent an increase of about seven-tenths of one percent over the one-year period. This is weaker than the national number.

In the chart below, the Florida real estate boom, with its construction jobs, can be seen in the early part of the last decade, interrupted briefly by Hurricane Ivan. That growth rate then fell sharply as the real estate bubble burst. Pensacola, along with the rest of Florida, entered the Great Recession earlier and suffered more severe job losses than the rest of the nation.

This area came out of the recession earlier and grew more strongly than the nation until interrupted by the oil spill. The past several years have seen job growth recovery, but the most recent months show Pensacola growing more slowly than the national average rate.

Changes in growth rates don’t have to be huge in order for us to feel very differently about our economic performance.

An increase of 1,000 jobs a year from our current performance is not so large in absolute terms, although it is a big percentage increase. It would make a noticeable difference in our two-county area. It would be enough to change the way we view our economic prospects.

We face challenges in employment growth, particularly due to the importance of federal government employment in our local economy.

We now have about 5,000 fewer government workers (local, state and federal) than we did 25 years ago. Employment in education and healthcare services peaked about three years ago and now is flat, in contrast to strong growth over the preceding two decades.

Employment growth challenges will persist in an era of decreasing growth in government spending, and pending cuts in the growth rate of federal healthcare spending in Florida. Inbound migration of retirees and continued growth in tourism will help keep our employment growth roughly equal to the national rate.

As usual, what we need to worry about is not so much job quantity, but job quality. Improved training and education outcomes are the key to both quality and quantity.

[progresspromise]