The Texas Workforce Commission has released the April 2025 employment reports. Click here to read it.
Here are my personal comments:
The manufacturing industry added 4,600 jobs in Texas in April, which puts us back into positive territory, with a total of 3,100 net jobs so far this year. Construction has added 32,000 and Energy added 3,000 jobs year-to-date
As I mentioned last month, the unemployment rate in Cameron County jumped up from 5.6% in February to 6.2% in March, and it now has increased to 6.9% in April! The other counties in the region all decreased in April.
Cameron County Data Analysis:
- The Civilian Labor Force increased once again in Cameron County- by another 3,641 people last month. The number of unemployed people jumped up by another 1,574 people, on top of the large adjustment that was made in the March reports. This is what has spiked the unemployment monthly rates there in both March and April compared to last year and earlier this year.
- I did confirm my suspicion that large adjustments were made to the Cameron County labor market numbers, as part of a statewide ongoing auditing/adjusting process at TWC that occurs every 10 years. TWC has made permanent adjustments to all the monthly Civilian Labor Force and “number of employed/unemployed” data across the state as of this spring.
- This means that when we look back to prior years to compare historical unemployment rates, it may not be a valid comparison, depending on the size of any adjustments made.
- These adjustments suggest to me that the overall unemployment rates have been understated for somewhere between 2 and 10 years for Cameron County. It changed across all three large cities as well as the county, and the size of the Labor Force, # employed, and the # of unemployed all had large adjustments.
- I do not have time to dig into this any further, but I do remember this happening in the past as well. I noticed it and questioned it with the economists at TWC in 2015 (when I worked for WF Solutions) and was told that these “decade-level” adjustments are necessary to ensure data is accurate going forward. I do not believe that they go back to prior years and adjust all the entire statewide datasets as necessary to “reset” the information, due to the tremendous cost that would be incurred.
- Please remember that all of the federal, state, and local employment, unemployment, and wage numbers that are created are estimates based on a large number of variables, including things like unemployment claims changes, data from businesses in the Quarterly Census of Employment & Wages (QCEW), and from statewide household surveys to determine the Civilian Labor Force, the % of people working, looking for work, or out of the labor force, etc.
- Capturing unemployment, employment, and wage data is not an exact science and never can be. It has never been an actual headcount of individuals or a 100% sample of residents. I’m sure it is EXTREMELY challenging to get people to answer phones for household surveys, or even to get accurate responses from some people for obvious reasons.
Tariffs:
- As you all are aware, we are in the midst of “tariff and retaliatory tariff” negotiations with most of the rest of the world, and there is a lot of uncertainty regarding where this will all end up, and what the impact could be on inflation, recession, employment, revenue, job creation in the future for the Manufacturing industry, impact on reshoring initiatives, etc…. At this point it appears to me that we may be attempting to land at a near-universal 10% tariff from the majority of nations, with some higher tariffs where there are specific issues/concerns in the part of the administration. Trying to predict where we are going with this is of course impossible- this is just a general impression I am getting based on the first few negotiations that took place….
- We have around 90 countries we are planning to negotiate with from what I have read, and we have reached a verbal agreement with England, and started down a path of reducing the size of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs with China. We have been told that there are dozens of other negotiations underway (Mexico, the EU, India and Japan are several of the more critical ones). There are a lot of other countries to work on, and time is fast moving forward on the other 80+ countries that need to be resolved while the temporary pause is underway- stay tuned!
Thanks.
Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by Mike Willis, executive director of the South Texas Manufacturers Association. The column represents Willis’ personal views, not that of the association. The column first appeared in Willis’ electronic newsletter. It appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the author’s permission.
