Consulting up, so is bartending

Most of the sectors that saw big gains in February’s payroll report aren’t exactly high-end. Food services and drinking places (average hourly earnings: $12.70) added 58,700 jobs, seasonally adjusted; retail trade ($17.33) added 32,000; couriers and messagers ($18.92) 12,300.

Health care and social assistance, which added 32,800 jobs, pays a bit better – $25.31 an hour, or just over the national average for private, nonfarm employers. But one category really stood out. Professional and technical services, with average hourly earnings of $38.26, added 31,800 jobs.

Here’s the performance of the sector, broken down into its five constituent parts, since the jobs recovery began in early 2010:

The legal profession is in a long, slow decline. Computer-systems design (often called information technology consulting) and management consulting are booming. I’m not sure if this is because corporations are reinventing themselves with the help of consultants, or just outsourcing work to consultants to keep head count down.

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How’s finance been going? According to the jobs trajectory since 2005, not great.

Nondepository credit intermediation includes employers such as credit card issuers, consumer lenders and mortgage brokers. Many of them were hammered by the financial crisis and haven’t really come back. Employment in real estate credit (that is, outside of banks and savings institutions) is down 40 percent from January 2006 to January 2015.

I take this as evidence that the shadow banking system hasn’t really made a full comeback, at least in real estate finance. The other side of the shadow system, though, was Wall Street. And the securities industry has actually held up remarkably well. The securities industry also remains the most remunerative of the five financial sectors, with average hourly earnings of $48.09. It’s just not all that big.

The February gains in food-services employment inspired me to take a long-term look at America’s changing food habits. It turns out that while employment at food and beverage stores has been pretty much unchanged since 1990, employment at restaurants and bars has almost doubled. Must be all those hard-working consultants ordering takeout. •
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist. Previously, he was editorial director of the Harvard Business Review.

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