Skip to footer

The American mining jobs boom

America's mining job market is booming, with a 13.4 percent gain in the month of January.

|
John Hagen/AP/Fairbanks Daily News-Miner/File
This file photo shows Wayne Hashell of South Dakota working at at the Pogo Gold Mine outside Delta Junction, Alaska. The American mining market is booming, with a 13.4 percent increase in January.

Another noteworthy news from the latest employment report is that the boom in mining (including oil extraction) employment continued. Whereas overall employment rose 1.5% and overall private sector employment rose 2% in the year to January, mining employment gained as much as 13.4%. While it even after that gain was only 0.6% of total employment, its increase was 4.6% of the total increase in employment.

And that's only counting the direct employment in that sector. Add to that the jobs created by the demand from all those newly hired workers. The inflow of all those workers into the state who has benefited the most from the mining boom, North Dakota, has also created a construction boom in that state.

Though not the only factor, the direct and indirect effects of this mining boom is therefore an important factor behind the recent uptick in U.S. growth.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to The American mining jobs boom
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Stefan-Karlsson/2012/0207/The-American-mining-jobs-boom
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe