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September 2009, Vol. 132, No. 9
Health care industries and the New York City labor market
Martin Kohli
Regional Economist, New York Regional Office for Economic Analysis and Information, Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York, New York. E-mail: kohli.martin@bls.gov
From 1990 to 1995, New York City’s health care employment rose faster than the national average, but growth then slowed until 2002, when the pace quickened again; the 1995–2002 slowdown reflected slower growth in hospital care expenditures, while accelerated job growth after 2002 reflected strong growth in the elderly population and in home health care.
In the United States, employment in the health care industries has grown more rapidly than total nonfarm employment.1 From 1990 through 2008, for instance, annual average total employment increased by 25.2 percent, while in health care the percent change was an even more robust 58.3 percent.
In New York City, the same pattern has held: total employment rose by 6.4 percent over the same 18-year period, while health care employment expanded by 41.5 percent. Moreover, because industries other than health care have grown much more slowly in New York City than in the rest of the country, health care industries accounted for 52.1 percent of the 226,600 jobs gained during those years. As chart 1 shows, total em-ployment in all industries combined, other than health care, declined relative to 1990 in 14 of the next 18 years. (For the purposes of this article, health care consists of three private-sector industries—ambulatory care (NAICS 621), hospitals (622), and nursing and residential care facilities (623)—and State government hospitals.2 This breakdown includes all private-sector employment in health care industries. Current employment data for Federal and local government hospitals in New York City are not available. An appendix discusses the sources and concepts of the labor market information used in this article.)
This excerpt is from an article published in the September 2009 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
Footnotes
1 The stronger-than-average rate of job growth in health care goes back through at least the 1980s. See David R. H. Hiles, “Health services: the real jobs machine,” Monthly Labor Review, November 1992, pp. 3–16; and Jennifer M. Gardner and Howard V. Hayghe, “Slower economic growth affects the 1995 labor market,” Monthly Labor Review, March 1996, pp. 3–16. Both of these articles used data based on the Standard Industrial Classification system, whereas the current series are based on the North American Industrial Classification System. Kimberly Riley, Emily Lloyd, and Natalie Propst, “Payroll employment and job openings rate continued to grow in 2006,” Monthly Labor Review, March 2007, pp. 19–38, documented the fact that employment in private health care, in the current series, expanded more rapidly than total nonfarm employment over the period 2003–06.
2 Other studies of New York City’s health care industries have used different combinations of industries and ownerships. For example, Maria Kouznetsova, Robert Martiniano, and Jean Moore, The Health Care Workforce in New York, 2006: Trends in the Supply and Demand for Health Workers (Rensselaer, New York, Center for Health Workforce Studies, School of Public Health, State University of New York at Albany, January 2008), defined the health sector as including ambulatory care, hospitals, and nursing and personal care facilities for all ownerships, including Federal and local. Residential mental retardation, mental health, and substance abuse facilities (naics 6232) were excluded.
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