Private vs Government vs Non Working Population : 1962 vs 2012

I recently looked at the change in government employment over the years.   I thought it would be interesting to look at a 'now and then' comparison of the labor force from 50 years ago in 1962 versus today.  

Most of the employment numbers I got from the BLS CES page.  I used the 'multi-screen data search' to get historical figures for government and non-government employment.   I also used the numbers for uniformed military and Dept. of Defense civilian employees from my previous article and then added those to get the total military personnel.   I used BLS site to find the labor force participation rate for people over 65 then figured the number of retired workers by multiplying the labor force participation rate of people over 65 versus the total population over 65.   The total population, and how it breaks down by age is off Census sites including the American factfinder.   I used 2010 numbers for age % and I used the 2007 military numbers.   So both those details are a bit off from the actual 2012 numbers but close enough.

First off lets look at who works and who doesn't:

and

Wow, less than 1/3 of the population worked back in 1962.    A lot of that is due to more 1 job families then as well as more children.   A lot more people work now.

Lets further break down the entire population including sub sections of working and non working populations :

and

Private employment and government employment have increased but the military employment has dropped.   Among the non working population there are fewer children and more retirees and fewer portion of the adult age population is non working.

If we just look at the working population and then break down the government versus private jobs :

and

More of the labor force is in private industry and we have fewer people in the military.

Breaking down the sub sections of government employment further :

and

Military dropped significantly from '62 till today.  The USPS was cut in half.  Federal jobs excluding military and USPS dropped a little.  Other state government jobs were flat as a % of all jobs and local government jobs were up a bit.   Educational jobs at the state and local level both grew significantly.   In 1962 we had about 2.9 million jobs in state / local education representing 5.1% of the workforce but by 2012 it had grown to 10.2 million workers which is 7.7% of all jobs.   This bit of information seems noteworthy and I will likely dig into this further in another article to try and see exactly why there are so many more education jobs.

Lastly for reference, here are a couple tables giving the raw figures I used for actual employment numbers (in thousands)

	1962	2012
all employees	54891	132461
all with military	57731	133888
Military	3910	2078
non government	46040	110470
government	7781	21340
non government	47110	111121
dod	1070	651
fed	2433	2831
USPS	587.5	619.3
fed non USPS	775.5	1560.7
state	1624	5052
state edu	487.8	2389.9
state other	1136.2	2662.1
local	4794	14108
local edu	2470.6	7858.4
local other	2323.4	6249.6

and

	1962	2012
total population	186537	312708
Military	3910	2078
non government	46040	110470
government	7781	21340
non working	128806	178820
under 15	57904	61916
over 65	17457	40965
% work >65	19.4%	18.40%
retired	14070	33427
kids	57904	61916
non worker adults	56832	83477
Military	3910	2078
private industry	46040	110470
government	7781	21340
Workers	57731	133888
Non Workers	128806	178820

--