Minneapolis has been a manufacturing center for nearly a century.  This status has been both detrimental as well as a boon for the city and the region, depending on the time frame in question.  This most recent recession has cut about 130,000 jobs out of the employment environment in Minneapolis alone.  Most of these jobs cuts came early and quite quickly after the start of the recession.  The unemployment rate in Minneapolis is currently at 7.5%, which is actually an inaccurate number, considering that since most manufacturing jobs were lost quite some time ago, those people who lost their job no longer qualify for government unemployment benefits and or are no longer looking for work.  In either case, they are no longer counted in the official unemployment numbers, and therefore do not negatively affect the unemployment rate.  Minneapolis’s real unemployment rate may be closer to 12%-15%, given all of the people who have stopped looking for work or who are underemployed.

Other major job cuts came in the government sector, which shed more than 5,000 jobs in 2009 alone.  Sectors that have shown some small growth, like trade and transportation, and utilities, remain quite hot in the upper Midwest region, but have done little to help Minneapolis keep its unemployment rates low.  The city government is also trying to change the way unemployment is measured in an effort to attract positive attention to the region and perhaps some growth and investment over the next decade.  The city is trying to average the unemployment rates over three month periods so as to offset the numbers from months where more people have been out of work.  This sleight of hand seems a little dishonest, but the city is in desperate need of jobs and new sectors that will provide more economic diversification and sustainable growth.

Inflating numbers has been a problem for the city of Minneapolis where, recently it was discovered that there are 15,000 fewer people working than were previously thought to have jobs.  This gap went unaccounted for for months, and acted to pad the unemployment figures by a few tenths of a percent.

Even the education sector has shed jobs in the past year due to the fact that far fewer school districts were hiring at the beginning of the 2009 school year.  This sector, though nearly always in demand, has shown some misgivings in recent years relating to sustainable growth.  This may come from the fact that population growth has remained relatively stagnant in the Minneapolis area.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area is really hurting under the intense weight of the recession.  There are fewer jobs here than in many other northern Midwest cities, and the trend looks like it will continue for at least another year or two.  Minneapolis has tried to draw high tech firms and more highly-skilled workers to its city but has not had very much success in recent years.  We shall see if their latest attempt at drawing economic growth by skewing their unemployment numbers will have any real positive effect in the coming decade as the recession fades away into history.