Breaking down Bakken jobs

from Prairie Business June 2013

Seeing is believing

Report examines employment, salary shifts

BY KRIS BEVILL

An analysis recently released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics takes on the complex task of evaluating employment and wage changes in the Bakken region over the past few years as a result of the area’s ongoing oil and gas boom. The report, released in April, compares employment and wages in specific sectors from 2007, before the boom significantly ramped up, until 2011, which is the most recently available annual data.

Analysts found overall employment in the region increased by nearly 36 percent during that time frame, with Williams County experiencing the greatest amount of growth. The number of workers in Williams County, which includes the towns of Williston, Ray, Tioga and Epping, increased by more than 12,500 from 2007 to 2011, more than doubling the county’s employment, according to the report. As expected, about half of the jobs added were in mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction.

Report authors Paul Ferree and Peter Smith noted that while Ward County had just one oil-producing well as of March 2011, that county also experienced significant job growth from 2007 to 2011. About 3,200 jobs were created during that time. Ward County, which includes the city of Minot, holds the largest number of jobs in the Bakken region and accounted for more than 31,000 jobs in 2011. New jobs created in the county during the timeframe analyzed for the report were spread across several sectors, including mining, quarrying and oil and gas, as well as construction, transportation and hospitality.

Region-wide, the mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction industries experienced a 276 percent increase in employment from 2007 to 2011, accounting for about 14,500 workers in 2011. However, the report found that other industries actually experienced higher percentages of growth. Employment in the professional and technical services and transportation and warehousing industries each grew by more than 300 percent from 2007 to 2011. The professional and technical services industry employed just 521 workers in 2007, but grew to include more than 2,400 workers in 2011. Meanwhile, the transportation and warehousing sector increased from 1,465 workers in 2007 to nearly 6,350 in 2011.

Real estate and rental leasing salaries experienced the greatest increase during the four-year period. Salaries in that sector doubled from 2007 to 2011, up to an average annual pay of about $72,000 in 2011. The report found that the professional and technical services industry experienced the second largest increase in pay, increasing by 85 percent over the four-year timeframe. In 2011, the average annual pay in that industry was about $64,500.

The report also found that while the region’s overall employment increased, some sectors experienced a decrease in employment. The health care and social assistance sector lost about 1,350 workers from 2007 to 2011. Administrative and waste services, which already had a lower concentration of employment in the area compared to the national average, experienced the second largest decline, with 727 fewer workers in 2011 compared to 2007.

“These two decreases had an offsetting effect on the region’s employment growth equal to about 7.4 percent of the size of the region’s net job increase,” the authors said in the report. The overall result of the Bakken energy boom, according to the report, is a regional economy dominated by oil and gas-related employment, with a lower percentage of jobs in industries that have not experienced the same amount of rapid growth, including government, health care and retail trade. PB

Kris Bevill Editor, Prairie Business 701-306-8561, kbevill@prairiebizmag.com

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