Massachusetts marked a sobering milestone last month: For the first time since World War II, the state ended a decade with fewer jobs than it had at the beginning.
The decade started with a technology bust and ended with a historic national recession. Job loss was spread over most of the state’s major employment sectors, as the decade’s quickening pace of globalization, competition, and technological change pressured the Massachusetts economy. Manufacturing took the biggest hit, shedding one job in three.
“The job creation engine for Massachusetts is broken,’’ said Michael Goodman, an economic analyst and professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “We have a high tech, innovation economy, but one that is not creating enough jobs.’’
In the decade from 1999 through 2009, average employment in the state fell by 55,000 jobs, or nearly 2 percent. The employment base grew by 4 percent in the 1990s and by 20 percent in the 1980s.
The jobless decade was not unique to Massachusetts. A dozen other states lost jobs over the past 10 years, led by Michigan, where the imploding auto industry drove annual average employment down by more than 15 percent. Nationally, job growth was essentially zero from the end of 1999 to the end of last year.
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But underlying this dismal performance was acceleration in the long-term shift from manufacturing to a knowledge-driven, service-producing economy, analysts said. As the Internet eliminated distance among US firms and lower cost areas and other technologies sped up automation, tens of thousands of high-paying manufacturing and technology jobs vanished in Massachusetts.
“As the state has become more concentrated in high-skill jobs, we have lost these middle jobs,’’ said Alan Clayton-Matthews, a Northeastern University economics professor. “The question is, what’s going to replace them?’’ ...
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