Service Jobs - Repair-Main-Personal

The Last Three Services from the Other Sector

There are four sub-sectors that were put into the sector classification called, Other. One was Non-Profit organizations discussed earlier. The other three service sub sectors have little in common with each other, or non-profit organizations. They are Repair and Maintenance Services, Personal and Laundry Services, and Private Households.
Repair and Maintenance had a monthly average of 1.19 million jobs in 2012 with 70 percent of jobs in car and truck repair. That total includes 140.7 thousand employed at car washes along with other jobs at bump shops and auto glass replacement. Car crashes reduce our well-being but create jobs and production adding to the gross domestic product.

The rest of Repair and Maintenance has 360.6 thousand jobs at establishments fixing or maintaining commercial machinery and electronic equipment, or fixing household goods. More than half of these jobs are in the commercial segment. Establishments doing household repairs for lawnmowers, appliances, shoe repair, watch repair, upholstery and a few more have around 67.8 thousand jobs.

Personal services had 1.31 million jobs in 2012. Beauty parlors and barbershops have 627.9 thousand jobs and growing. The rest of the jobs are at funeral parlors, cemeteries, crematories, laundry and dry cleaning, pet care, photo finishing, and parking lots. Laundry and dry cleaning services and photo finishing jobs continue to drop a few thousand a year. Parking lot jobs are up again after dropping from the 2008-2009 recession and now at 118.9 thousand jobs.

Pet Care Services employment is up with more jobs every single year since 1992 and now at 74.6 thousand. The only occupation with lots of jobs in the Pet Care Services industry has the quaint Bureau of Labor Statistics definition: Non-Farm Animal Caretaker. Their job description turns out to be a list of down to earth activities: train, feed, water, groom, bathe and exercise animals, and clean, disinfect and repair their cages. There are 85.6 thousand of them and some work at zoos but quite a few work personal services, mostly as kennel workers and dog walkers.

Few jobs need college degree skills in any of these sub sectors, around one percent actually. Repair and maintenance and personal service firms have very similar staffing in that they all tend to have a manager, a receptionist, an office clerk, a bookkeeper and maybe a secretary or someone else in office administration. After that it is jobs doing services.

Many jobs here in installation, maintenance and repair require training and experience and the best jobs in these sub sectors are doing these occupations. Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics have 225.4 thousand jobs just in auto repair shops out of 596.1 thousand total jobs. Other auto mechanics work at auto dealerships or for gasoline stations. About another 149.9 thousand do car body repair or replace broken glass out of independent shops.

Electrical and electronics installation, maintenance and repair occupations have 47.1 thousand out of just over 601.3 thousand jobs. Many of these jobs are also in manufacturing, retail and the telecommunications industries.

Private households are classified as an industry in the North American Industry Classification System because households employ cooks, maids, butlers and caretakers to produce services at households. These services are transactions and production and so they are counted as part of the GDP and given their own sector. They are not counted as part of establishment employment because households are not establishments for purposes of establishment data. The Bureau of the Census reports 724 thousand jobs in non-agricultural households with more than 90 percent of the jobs as maid, nanny, personal aide and cook. However, they are not in the 115.3 million of total national service employment, even though they are definitely services.

With a 115.3 million service jobs to divvy up, repair and maintenance services and personal services employment gives us 2.5 million jobs, but that is only 1.9 percent of service employment. Repair and maintenance services and personal services continue to grow but slowly and less than the national average from 1990 to 2012. They will continue to lose share even though they have more jobs. We have two sub sectors left to go: accommodation and food services, and government service, excluding education. The two sectors have 21.1 million jobs.