In March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released revised estimates of state and metro area nonfarm employment. As a result, more than 4 thousand jobs were added to the estimated total employment in the Chattanooga metro area. Revisions of this sort are an annual occurrence and can lead to dramatic changes in what we think happened in the past. This year’s revisions, for example, indicate that three-year job growth for 2021-2023 was 25.9 thousand rather than the already booming 21.6 thousand. These numbers will be revised again in a year when estimates for 2021 and 2022 are subject to routine tweaking and the estimates for 2023 get new benchmarks. Revisions of the scale seen this year are not unusual, but they have become more common since the COVID pandemic.
