The front page of today's Post-Dispatch has
an article about the near-term prospect for St. Louis employment. I'm quoted in it. According to me,
Hiring "is stuck on hold nationally and will probably continue to drift down a little," said Howard Wall, director of the Institute for the Study of Economics and the Environment at Lindenwood University. "We're just along for the ride, and there's not much we can do about it."
I also say that
SSM, which is hiring, now ranks third in the region in terms of total employment, barely 300 jobs behind second-place Boeing. Wall attributes much of that growth to the absorption of small local hospitals by larger health care systems.
Even so, he says, the boom in health care hiring points to the direction of the regional economy in both the short and long term.
"The era of big employers is over," he said. "Boeing is the last of the big manufacturers. It shows the St. Louis era of big manufacturing is on the wane."
