Statistics Reveal 698 Jobs Lost In 2011
The 2012 edition of the Bermuda Job Market Employment Brief was released today [Apr.18], and highlights the main findings of the 2011 Annual Employment Survey.
In the 2011, Bermuda Employers reported a loss of 698 jobs in 2011 compared to 2010. There were 37,399 jobs counted in 2011 compared to 38,097 in 2010.
Non-Bermudians comprised the majority of job losses accounting for 691 positions. There were 60 job losses that were held by Bermudians, while job counts for spouses of Bermudians and permanent residence certificate holders increased by 30 and 23, respectively.
The number of filled jobs in the international business sector dipped from 4,287 in 2010 to 4,077 in 2011, down 210 jobs.
Total filled positions in the hotel industry increased by 131 jobs in 2011, while the construction industry continued to experience declines in employment levels, reporting a loss of 493 jobs between 2010 and 2011.
Complimentary copies of the Employment Brief are available at the Department of Statistics which is located on the 3rd floor of the Cedar Park Centre Building, 48 Cedar Avenue in Hamilton.
The full report is below [PDF here] click ‘Fullscreen’ for greater clarity:
These figures aren’t the best, but they are certainly a big improvement over 2009 & 2010.
Best thing to note is that there were 7 less jobs held by residents, compared to the 2009-2010 drop of over 500 jobs held by residents.
Looks like this long recession may be finally nearing an end.
Keep hoping. That is all you will have with the PLP.
They have no plan to get out of this recession, just hope.
Interesting comment. Growth in Jobs is seen in hotel and restaurants, same industries that gov gave payroll tax relief to. Do you think that is a coincidence?
Hope doesn’t get you anywhere, I’m sure you’d have preferred the numbers to be much worse.
this tax relief is artificial…
when the government realizes that their expenses are still higher than their revenues, revenues will have to be increased when the government’s access to debt is exhausted… how do you think this happens?
you guessed it right, reintroduce payroll tax on those exempt industries. which will send them back into downward spiral.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense. They were growing during growth times with the taxes in place. With a return to growth you reintroduce the taxes. I don’t think anyone expects them to exist forever.
the topic is jobs (headcount) growth, not economic (profitability) growth.
“They were growing during growth times with the taxes in place. With a return to growth you reintroduce the taxes.”
you make it sound like the hospitality industry is observing jobs growth because business is good… this is where you are wrong. that concept is ancient history (or should i say so 2005.)
jobs growth was observed because more and more positions are part-time (to reduce costs such as overtime and benefits), therefore requiring more employees. headcount is up, yes. (and if i had to guess, it is foreign headcount @ much lower salary.) but profitability is not up. in fact, the industry is nowhere near producing acceptable profit margins.
reintroduce payroll tax, and that’s another hit to the industry’s bottom line. no choice but to layoff again.
WAKE UP!!!!!! There have been many news reports in 2011 about Bermudian lay offs & job losses in both the hotel & restaurant industries here. Notice that there is no mention in the latest stats of who has benefited from these job growths. I don’t need statistics to know who has benefited from growths in hotel & restaurant industries because have seen with my own eyes & heard with my own ears from those laid off. Until all prejudices about non IB Bermudians not working up to par as non IB foreigners is thwarted our recession will continue. There has been cessations of millions of dollars per year circulating in Bermuda’s economy because of these prejudices. Another country is benefiting more from hotel & restaurant industries here than we are.
See its not that bad! And people claim the plp don’t know what they’re doing.
Sarcasm?
No sarcasm its the plp policies that have ensure that we haven’t slipped into a deeper recession. We really should be thanking them
Riiiiiiight
If I’m on a cruise & the captain crashes the ship into a reef should I thank him for trying to bail out the water just so he can save his own hide? Besides its an illusion & the bucket the captain is using has a hole in it while we are STILL sinking deeper into recession. By 2014 if nothing is done to make a permanent change we will be past recession & in a depression.
Really, how bad could 4 or 5 years without a premier or political parties be?
The civil servants know how to run things without the interfering amateurs
and think of the savings. Bonus is permanent secretaries won’t have to spend
all that time writing speeches for cabinet ministers who can’t speak off the cuff..ever
and what a disgrace that is giving a ministerial presentation to the public with your head
down mumbling semi coherently.
Party politics is the problem, two opposing teams constantly at each others throat and looking for divisive ways to achieve power.
Independents and a decreased number of constituencies would be the best way forward.
No more party squabbling. Independent MP’s that answer to their constituents and the public, not their party.
@Nitty Gritty I agree these politicians are useless as a boat out of water all they do is talk talk talk. Bring Castro in to run things. No one in Cuba is without food on the table. And the tourist industry is taken off again.
Thanking the PLP?? Are you crazy? Any lost job is a lost job too many. This is the worse government ever!
These numbers do not seem correct. If only 60 job losses affected Bermudians, why does the Government say several thousand Bermudians are unemployed?
They can’t count?
Ringmatser you are surely not one of the sharpest Knives in the draw.
You the one circulating the “Carifta” email is it what you posted the other day?
LOL
@Hi Liter. If you want to get smart, it is “drawer” unless you are referring to a raffle. By the way, any comment on the loss of only 1 job by a black Bermudian between 2010 and 2011? Do you still believe the Report or are you one of those that believe aeverything published by this Government?
@ Hi Liter. If you want to get smart it is “drawer”, not draw.
I guess you must be one of those that believes everything that this Government produces without question.
The Government has never said several thousand are unemployed, that is the opposition.
Also, You would need to go back to the start of the recession. The job losses slowed dramatically last year, especially among residents, but from 2008-2010 there were steep losses in Bermudians employed.
PLP people are the only ones who look at continued job losses by the hundred and see it as a reason to congratulate each other.
When Paula called 2010 a “year of recovery”, I guess she was wrong.
Government still can’t balance the books and have put lead shoes on Bermuda with the debt. We may be swimming hard, but ultimately this will come and bite us. It is inevitable that the PLP will have to cut the government jobs, as the can’t keep borrowing mony from overseas, locally, taking from pension fund and other funds intended to cover future payments. PLP overheated the economy here and we haven’t even begun pying for it. Pats on the back are most certainly not in order.
If only 60 Bermudians lost their jobs why are we reading about ’100s’ of families needing financial assistance etc? These figures don’t take into account the self-employed -=all those Bermudians who work in building and other trades. And who cares about the foreigners.
They also don’t count people who lost a good job and had to take a worse one, or who are not able to work they hours.
Bermudians are hustlers, entrepreneurial, and put themselves back to work after job losses…
Er, that should be “the hours” instead of “they hours”.
Let’s not forget that a lot more Bermudians have lost their jobs but found others – often lower paying than the ones that they had before. In this survey those job losses aren’t counted.
Add Gibbon’s Company and Saltus to those job losses today!
I guess this is the Platinum period EB told us about.
“These numbers do not seem correct”
Pay these figures no mind… We all know government can’t count!
Today you argue against facts, tomorrow you’ll be relying on them. you can’t pick and chose what facts you like to support and the ones you don’t .
Fact is from 2010-2011, there were only 7 LESS residents working. Compared with the steep drops we’ve seen before. Employment is a lagging indicator of a recovery. I don’t think we’re anywhere close to a recovery, however it is encouraging that the hemorrhaging has slowed.
Do you really believe that from 2010-2011 only 7 LESS residents were working? If this was so why have rents tumbled 25-40%; retail sales fallen for 3 years and imports down 10% to give a few examples? This is an astonishing statistic which in my view shows that this Report cannot be believed.
Voice of Reason, do you also believe in things like tooth faries, leprechauns, and the existence of the yeti?
Cancer has a point! Look at the articles in the links below all from the recent year. Something is only a fact if there is proof to back up what’s stated. The only thing that will save a life after massive hemorrhaging is a transfusion of the same blood type & this hasn’t happened. If what is happening in the articles linked below continues its off to the mortuary as the next step. RIP Bermuda Economy
http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20110927/BUSINESS/709269900
http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20111026/NEWS06/710269961
http://bermudasun.bm/main.asp?SectionID=24&subsectionID=899&articleID=56285
http://www.royalgazette.com/article/20120419/BUSINESS03/704199999
According to table 1, Voice of Reason:
1 black person lost his job in the past year
387 white people lost their jobs
310 “other” people (i.e. not white or black) lost their jobs in 2011.
So. Of the 622 jobs lost, only 1 was held by a black person. All the others were white and other races.
Answer this honestly, Voice of Reason: Do these stats sound right to you?
how many people are in the Department of Statistics? 2 many?
Misdirection is a grand illusion & seems to have left many scratching their heads knowing there is a trick but how & some who actually believe its real magic. I see that poster Al has had a glimpse up one of the sleeves & seen what’s been hidden there. There is another trick that AI has missed up the other sleeve. The other trick is that many of those who have lost jobs & found new ones have only found part time jobs which is another equation not mentioned in the stats. All who live here know that its virtuously impossible for a LOCAL to live a decent life & make a future for themselves on a part time job or as Al has pointed out a low paying job. Once again they feel they had to deceive us.
The initial increase in payroll tax was very detrimental to large private sector employers, it pretty much caused an unnecessary job cull. Hence the closure of CITI Group not to mention many others who moved back office and other functions off of the Island due to increased employer tax. That was a classic knee jerk reaction by Paula to try and raise government tax revenues in order to keep liquidity to pay for the bloated Civil service. Robbing Peter to pay Paul because Paul is the one that votes for you. But down the road when Peter has left he ultimately pays Paul’s wages.
Taking private sector tax and paying it to the civil service is all they care about. Those are the people that vote for them, those are their sheep that must be fed.
It is not sustainable and Bermuda will fall flat on it’s face as the cost of living will continue to go up and there will be less tax $$ to pay inflated civil service wages. Jobs within the civil service will have to be shed and government ministries will either need to be downsized or outsourced.
It cannot continue in the form of borrowing, if it does then our debt leverage will be too high to achieve a credible financial rating and we will have lost our attraction to the business community.
FYI Gibbons announced today they were going to make job cuts. At the same time the restaurant business has seen several locations close, on the flip side the immigration side of things has seen them forced to hire more Bermudians for the first time in years, hence why you see the uptick in the hospitality sector.
We really need a Hotel on this Island and we need one badly. That could the jolt to the economy that can pick us up.
Sonesta and St.Georges just sit there abandoned because Ewart could not deliver his Platinum promises.
Not only did the tax increase make things more expensive for the companies, it also demonstrated that the government was whimsical. Keep in mind that companies prefer a reasonably stable environment in order to plan for the future. Combine Cox’s whims with those of Burch & Brown, and you can quickly get the impression that Bermuda is run by a bunch of unstable people.
@ Bermyman
I was not going to bother with a response but your ‘analysis’ is entirely incorrect. Please take more time to understand that the CitiGroup closure had little to do with Bermuda but more to do with their underlying loss of business.
Many still claim that work permits etc were a major factor in many companies leaving the island. This is another fallacy and can be proven by looking at the number of work permits that were reduced in the early 1990′s under the UBP and before the introduction of term limits.
Generally speaking Bermuda is a very high cost jurisdiction, principally (but not solely) as a result of housing. Added to that, many companies have suffered reduced investment returns that have caused them to focus more closely on their bottom lines. As a conseqence many have outsourced none core support functions to other, lower cost jurisdictions. Bermuda’s ability to react to the lower cost jurisdictions is limited because of the aforementioned general cost of living in Bermuda.