Employment statistics in our industry -- the real truth!

Many of us in the industry know that the employment numbers posted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics have been incorrect for a very long time. Many BLS numbers are entirely different than industry numbers, because they only count production employees (but not those in mailing operations!) and because many of the job titles/occupations they use in their data collection instruments are 30 to 50 years old.

In 2003, 1.1 million people were employed in the printing industry, but BLS reported fewer than 700,000.

Recently our industry (thanks Kathy Lauerman, PIAMS, and Mark Nuzzaco, NPES!) took a giant step forward when the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) accepted the graphic communication industry’s recommendations. OMB announced its decision in a January 21, 2009 Federal Register notice (Vol. 74, No. 12/Wednesday, January 21, 2009/Notices, P. 3920). Changes will be reflected in the 2010 Standard Occupational Classification for “Printing Workers.”

Unfortunately, although many of the correct job titles will soon be posted to reflect modern production jobs in the printing industry, they have refused to incorporate the rest of our employees in their data collection. For example, BLS believes that our Customer Service Representatives are no different than those in any other industry, and therefore should not be included in industry data. The same holds true for many of our other industry specific jobs.

State and local boards of education use the BLS employment data to develop their career and technical programs, and thus this misinformation has been the reason that printing programs have been closing at an alarming rate around the country.

Throughout the U.S., even in this rough economic time, skilled production workers who have been laid off are picked up immediately because we have virtually ceased bringing new employees into the industry. Production employees are in the most demand. The current workforce needs to have more technical skills than past generations, but web wizards, color management experts and even web-to-print systems cannot stand alone – they must have highly skilled counterparts who can run the pre-press, printing, finishing and mailing equipment to “print.” When our industry ignores the challenge of educating those potential production employees, we all lose.

The printing industry very much needs pre-press specialists, every type of press operator, skilled employees for binding, finishing and mailing, and more. We may be becoming more streamlined and efficient, but we still need to print!