From January to April, lender payrolls continued to tread water while the broader private sector recovered nearly 1.9 million jobs, according to the Labor Department's survey of employers.
The sideways drift followed cuts during the depths of the recession that were generally as severe as in the rest of the economy. But with the industry's biggest component — depositories — having suffered relatively mild job losses (see charts below), and pain concentrated in the ravaged mortgage business, a corresponding rebound seems unlikely.
After a peak of 116.6 million in June 2007, the private sector shed 11.4 million jobs through January, or roughly 10% of its work force. Over the same period, payrolls at depositories fell by 76,000, or about 4%, to 1.7 million in January. At mortgage banks and mortgage brokerages they fell 42%, to 250,000.
(With seasonal adjustments, private employers cut 8.5 million jobs through December last year after a peak work force of 115.6 million in December 2007. In the first four months of this year, close to half a million jobs were recovered.)
Employment by depositories likewise resisted the undertow that destroyed private-sector jobs in the first half of the decade, and, over a longer time frame, has been relatively stagnant. Its peak during the past 10 years — around 1.8 million in mid-2007 — was below the work force of 1.9 million that began the 1990s.
Mortgage jobs, by contrast, have long gone through booms and busts that mirrored the housing cycle. Most recently, a provisional cadre of brokers fueled much of an epic expansion and collapse in the industry. Their numbers jumped two-and-a-half-fold since the beginning of the decade to a peak of about 150,000 in mid-2006, but retreated by an equivalent amount to about 60,000 in March (the most recent figure available).
Pay has also been on a roller-coaster ride in the mortgage business, with government data indicating that recent times were fattest for workers who were there early during this decade's real estate frenzy. Average weekly earnings for nonsupervisory employees jumped by about a third from the beginning of 2001 to mid-2003, after adjusting for inflation, but quickly fell back to earth as payrolls continued to burgeon.
For the rank and file at depositories, meanwhile, pay grew a bit faster than in the private sector overall for the first half of the decade, and the gap in growth widened considerably in the second half. (From January 2001 to April this year, the weekly average increased 16% for depositories, compared with 5% for the private sector.)
In current dollars, average weekly earnings in March were $622 for nonsupervisory workers at depositories, $778 at mortgage brokerages, $896 at mortgage banks and $626 in the private sector as a whole.
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