Mountain Musingthe second lost

decade
By Wally Gordon
What is happening to the New Mexico
economy is a complicated story, but the
central plot of that tale is revealed in two
figures. In 2005, 871,248 New Mexicans
had jobs. In January of this year, however,
only 855,781 men and women were at work
in the state. Pessimists used to talk of a lost
decade. Now optimists hope that we will
only lose two decades before we recover
our footing. Almost as troubling as the
gross numbers is what they reveal about
the way the economic hard times are
remaking New Mexican society. The most

recent Labor Market Review of the state

Department of Workforce Solutions, whose
32 dense pages of data, graphs and charts
were released Monday afternoon, hints at
several of these trends: A shift of most
jobs from rural areas and small towns to the
Albuquerque-Santa Fe area.
The movement of thousands of jobs
from mining, manufacturing and related
fields to health care for the elderly.
A related migration of jobs from well
paid, semiskilled predominantly male
occupations to worse-paid, marginally
skilled and predominantly female jobs.
Revised figures showing New Mexico
did even worse last year than anyone knew.
Unemployment in New Mexico for
months among the worst in the nationthe

fourth highest in January.

Loss of jobs over the previous 12
months also remaining among the worst in
the U.S.the third highest in January.
If it werent for new jobs caring for the
elderly, mostly paid for by Obamacare and
federal Medicare and Medicaid dollars, the
loss of jobs would have been twice as
great.
One result of these trends is that more
people are now moving out of the state than
moving in. One study suggests that the
people we are losing are largely the young
and well educated, precisely those the state
most desperately needs to build a new
economy on the ruins of the old one.
That old economy stood on three legs:
mining, primarily oil and gas but also

notably molybdenum, coal and copper as

well as potash and carbon dioxide; four
military bases in the state plus Fort Bliss,
Texas, which encompasses much New
Mexico land and a lot of New Mexican
soldiers and workers; and the two national
labs with their 20,000 highly paid scientists,
engineers and technicians as well as
hundreds of subcontractors supplying
everything from lawn mowing to glass
blowing.
All three legs are in danger of collapsing
if they have not already done so.
Molybdenum and copper are history and
coal soon will be, taking big bites out of the
economy of the states north, northeast and
northwest. Meanwhile, oil and gas have
tanked, destroying the economy of the

southeast and rest of the northwest, and

nobody knows when they will recover.
Meanwhile the Pentagon is being forced
to plan for draconian cuts in manpower, and
wants to close more bases if Congress will
let it. Our military bases face, at best, a
tenuous existence; they clearly are not a
growth industry.
And Los Alamos and Sandia national
labs, which have failed to diversity much
beyond their core mission of nuclear
weapons, are struggling to survive a Cold
War that ended 27 year ago. I cannot
imagine parents urging their bright young
children today to go into the bomb-building
business.
Whats left? Tourism. It has been
depressed for years, although there are

scattered signs that it has just begun to

revive. Good snow has blessed the ski
resorts in Santa Fe and elsewhere, and the
Albuquerque airport is handling more
passengers. But tourist jobs are primarily
waiting on tables and cleaning hotel rooms.
Of course there is health care, which is
indeed booming. The University of New
Mexico wants to build a brand new hospital
in Albuquerque, and Presbyterian is
planning a new hospital in Santa Fe.
There are a lot of good jobs in health care
for doctors and technicians and registered
nurses, but alas a lot more jobs for
marginally trained workers to help the ailing
and dying elderly.
There is, of course, a way out of the
economic morass. Almost everybody

agrees on what it istraining a highly

skilled workforce for new jobs in the age of
IT and biotechnology and nanotechnology.
Unfortunately, the sector in New Mexico that
has seen the worst budget cuts over the
past decade is higher education. Not only
research universities but colleges and
community colleges have been forced to
reduce faculty, eliminate courses and raise
tuitionand do it all year after year, with no
end in sight.
Our leaders seem to be living in some
imaginary world in which education is a
luxury we can do without rather than the
pure essence of survival as we enter our
second lost decade.