The Chattanooga Times Free Press examined a CRER analysis of new BLS data describing recent trends in Chattanooga employment and unemployment:
The number of employees in the Chattanooga metro area fell slightly over the past year as private education and health jobs gained the most workers and the manufacturing sector lost the most.
“That’s reflective of a flattening of manufacturing nationally,” Howard Wall, director and chief economist at the Center for Regional Economic Research, said in a phone call. “That’s not unique to Chattanooga, but manufacturing was the driving force of the really strong job growth that we’ve had for the last 10 years or so.”