Construction Jobs Lead Louisiana’s Employment Growth

It's a tale of three cities. For Lake Charles and Baton Rouge employment news has been extremely good. For Lafayette, let's just say it's not be anything close to that. However, overall creation of jobs in our state has seen positive growth between February and March.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics  says employment in the state rose by 8-thousand jobs in the past month. Most of those job increases have been in the construction industry with Lake Charles and Baton Rouge leading the way.

How big is the construction boom? Employment in that field has seen some of it's highest increases since the post Katrina boom of 2006.

We’re seeing over the last month it grew by 1,600 jobs. I think we’re seeing a lot of that growth both in the Baton Rouge and Lake Charles region.

Those are the comments of Aaron Caffarel a spokesman for the Louisiana Workforce Commission. In a story published by the Louisiana Radio Network Cafferal went on to say that while construction jobs are on the increase there continues to be a downturn in oil and gas related employment.

The February numbers in the oil and gas sector showed a slight uptick from February to March with the unemployment rate growing from 5.9% to 6.1%. Still Caffarel says his agency is working hard to help those workers find other jobs in other fields.

So I know that when you see an increase in the unemployment rate some have cause for concern but we believe that is attributable to more people entering the work force, entering the civilian labor force.