U-M study: No new jobs in Michigan until 2011

A new report from the University of Michigan’s Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics concludes that while we may be nearing the end of the worst decline, job growth in Michigan will continue to be virtually non-existent until 2011 — and it won’t exactly be going like gangbusters after that. The Detroit News reports:

“If our forecast proves correct, the job decline that started in mid-2000 would bottom out in the summer quarter of 2011, with an aggregate job loss of 937,000 over that 11-year period, or about one in every five jobs that existed at the beginning of the period,” said a statement from George Fulton, director of the seminar.

“By the end of 2011, auto manufacturing in Michigan is forecast to employ just over a quarter of the workers it had on its rolls in mid-2000,” he added.

Fulton and his colleagues forecast that Michigan will have lost 283,000 jobs by the New Year — the largest single year of job loss in at least 70 years, as long as the data have been collected. Job losses will shrink to 85,000 in 2010 and 36,000 in 2011.

By the time it’s all over, Michigan will have recorded 11 straight years of job losses after averaging 58,000 new jobs annually in the preceding 30 years. But the U-M economists say the end of the worst may be near.

So is the glass half full because the worst is over? Or half empty because the losses are unlikely to reverse themselves? We may have to face the unpleasant fact that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be to hold the number of jobs we’re going to have for the foreseeable future.