WASHINGTON — In response to October’s Labor Department employment report, David Huether, senior vice president for economics and research at the U.S. Travel Association, said indicators show the travel industry is recovering.
“It’s another record-setting jobs month for travel, which continues to pace the economy in a number of indicators as it emerges from the recession,” he said. “Travel employment reached 8,027,000, based on the first-Friday Labor Department report and actually bested the 8 million mark for the first time in September according to the upward revision of the previous report.”
Huether said the travel industry has been among the most reliable job generators in the U.S. economy, adding jobs in 51 of the 60 months during the past five years and 800,000 jobs overall since the Great Recession.
“That’s more jobs than the entire manufacturing sector has created,” he said. “The travel industry has also created jobs at a 40 percent faster pace than the rest of the economy during the current expansion.”
One of the main reasons that the travel industry has been creating jobs faster than the rest of the economy is that travel is more export oriented, more labor intensive and more immune to offshore outsourcing than other sectors of the economy, Huether continued.
“Every $1 million in travel exports supports more than six U.S. jobs in the travel industry, which is three times more than the number of jobs supported by $1 million of agricultural exports.”
Coming out of a ground-shifting election, President Barack Obama said he’d look to work with Republicans on three specific issues: infrastructure improvement, boosting exports and job creation.
“Washington needs look no further than the travel industry to check all of those boxes,” Huether said. “Passing existing proposals, such as renewal of the Brand USA tourism promotion agency, would be terrific first steps for the new Congress.”
