The shakeout in the health-care industry and weakness in other services sharply curtailed job growth in the Philadelphia region early this year, the federal government said yesterday.
Both the city and its suburbs gained jobs in the first quarter compared with a year ago. But analysts focused on the slow rate of growth - 1.5 percent for the region. Philadelphia's private-sector job base rose by 6,400 in the first three months of the year, while 24,200 jobs were created in the suburbs.
The report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the area has returned to its position as one of the nation's slowest-growing.
In a separate report yesterday, the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry said the state's unemployment rate fell 0.4 percentage points in May to 3.8 percent, the lowest since February 1970.
But a department spokesman said the drop - which was double what had been anticipated - could have been a statistical blip associated with summer jobs.
He said companies may have accelerated their summer hiring because of the warm, sunny weather. But students who would take those jobs had not been released from school and so were not, officially at least, in the labor force. So employers hired whomever they could, driving down the unemployment rate.
"The point from our side is that the unemployment rate is still dropping, and we are getting jobs," said the spokesman, Scott Burkett. But he added, "The economy can't stay super-heated for too long. At this point, we're running out of skilled workers."
The federal report was the latest proof that the Philadelphia region's job growth has been slowing steadily since 1997. In the first quarter of that year, job growth was 3.2 percent.
"What a mess," Alan Paisner, the federal bureau's regional commissioner in Philadelphia, said yesterday. "You wonder if . . . we are going to revert to stability and then losses."
The Philadelphia area's job total was 2.3 million in the first quarter.
The urgent problem is that hiring in services - health care, education, business, and engineering and management - has slowed dramatically, while hiring in manufacturing is shrinking.
