One St. Mary job in nine is in energy industry

After years of ups and downs in the oil patch, energy still accounts for about one of every nine St. Mary Parish jobs, figures from state and federal agencies show.
Statistics released Wednesday by the Louisiana Workforce Commission say that in January, St. Mary’s unemployment rate was up more than half a point to 7.3 percent in December, and up 1.6 points from January 2014.
While the number of St. Mary nonfarm jobs has increased by more than 100 to about 23,600 over the last year, the number of unemployed people seeking jobs has grown four times as fast.
Plummeting oil prices in the last half of 2014 are generally blamed for cooling Louisiana’s employment growth.
In September 2014, the last year for which federal data are available, more than 2,600 of St. Mary’s 22,700 private-sector workers, or about 11.5 percent, were employed in natural resource and mining occupations, the category that includes most oil and gas activity. That was down from a November 2013 peak of more than 2,700.
In the fourth quarter of 2014, the average weekly wage for a natural resource-mining employee was $1,741, or about $800 more than the average paycheck for all St. Mary Parish workers.
Natural resource-mining employees in St. Mary earn an average total of just less than $5 million a week, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data.