By Mike Willis
Greetings South Texas Manufacturers Association members and RGG Business Journal readers.
Our partners at the McAllen Workforce Solutions Board office have released their March 2026 Employment report. Click here to read it.
My observations on the report:
- As is typical for the Spring season, unemployment rates declined across the region in March. Cameron County showed a slight increase in the unemployment rate from March 2025.
- In the past 12 months, Texas gained 21,600 Construction jobs but lost 8,500 manufacturing jobs and lost 6,500 jobs in the oil & gas sector.
I tweaked the Monthly Unemployment Chart and added a column to the far right that shows the changes in the size of the Civilian Labor Force in the past twelve months:
- Cameron County shows a reduction of 3,599 people in their Civilian Labor Force (CLF) over the past 12 months. Hidalgo County grew by 961. Both almost always grow significantly over time!
- Some of this may be due to the closing of Seatrium at the Port of Brownsville, but I also think TWC/BLS have a hard time capturing employment changes at the really large-scale, fast-growing projects and businesses operating there now (EX: SpaceX, RGVLNG, Seatrium, etc.)
- The actual employment by industry estimates seldom come close to capturing the changes in the number of people working in mfg. and construction sectors at these types of businesses in my opinion. The employment/unemployment data is based primarily on random “Household surveys” which have increasingly lower low response rates. There are a number of other variables that are also used in the process. Also, “temp-to-hires” show up in the “Business & Professional Services” sector where staffing agency employment is found.
- Industry job growth and wage projections are a very different set of metrics and data-gathering processes from those used to estimate employment and unemployment. This data is primarily based on where people work (or where the payroll is generated), per random mandatory business “Establishment” surveys. There are other variables that provide input into the numbers for this metric as well. I believe that in some cases, when payrolls are generated at corporate or regional offices outside of the RGV, the industry employment data is recorded at the “payroll” site rather than the actual worksites…..
- For the entire USA the CLF declined by 551,000 people in the past 12 months.
- The total number of people in the CLF who were EMPLOYED declined by 646,000 in the past year
- The total number of people in the CLF who were UNEMPLOYED increased by 95,000 in the past year
- This likely reflects some combination of “Baby Boomer” retirements and large numbers of immigrants either being deported, voluntarily leaving the country, or remaining here but leaving jobs they had and no longer working or looking for work. It may also be the result of reluctance of undocumented people in the USA now to report that household members are working or looking for work if selected in the household surveys. (There have never been questions regarding citizenship or legality to work here included in those surveys, for obvious reasons)
- Either way, it means a half-million employed people we had in March 2025 appear to be no longer employed here and contributing in some way to our economy.
- These CLF reductions likely did not have the effect of “loosening” the labor market. If 500,000 people had lost jobs and become unemployed, the CLF would not have dropped, but that would have raised the unemployment rate and “improved” the number of hiring opportunities for businesses. Since that number of people are no longer in the CLF, it had a fairly neutral impact on the total labor market data and unemployment rates.
- For the previous same two-year periods (March 2025 and March 2024) the USA CLF increased by 2.7 million and 1.2 million people respectively.
Sorry to get “in the weeds” again, but this is fairly significant information to be aware of regarding the labor market!
Editor's Note: The above commentary was penned by Mike Willis, executive director of the South Texas Manufacturers Association. The commentary appears in the RGG Business Journal with the approval of the author. This story has been updated to correct a mistake in the original headline.
