Utilities
The share of jobs within commuting reach of a tract that are in utilities, and how that share has moved over five years.
On this page
Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share that are in the utilities sector. This describes the mix of nearby work rather than its volume.
The Census Bureau defines the sector as comprising "establishments engaged in the provision of the following utility services: electric power, natural gas, steam supply, water supply, and sewage treatment and disposal." Within it, "electric power includes generation, transmission, and distribution; natural gas includes distribution; steam supply includes provision and/or distribution; water supply includes treatment and distribution; and sewage removal includes collection, treatment, and disposal of waste through sewer systems and sewage treatment facilities" (2022 NAICS Manual). Waste management firms that do not operate through sewer systems are excluded and belong to the administrative and waste management sector instead.
Utilities is one of the smallest sectors by employment almost everywhere, and its workplaces are physical installations — generating stations, treatment plants, control centers, service yards. A single facility can therefore account for most of the sector's jobs across a wide area. Read a visible utilities share as evidence that such infrastructure is nearby, which is a statement about the built environment as much as about the labor market.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
Jobs are counted where the work is located, not where the worker lives. Utility employment is also administered from headquarters and depots that may sit far from the infrastructure being operated.
The Census Bureau protects employer confidentiality before publication. The disclosure limitation applied to "the workplace component of LODES uses employer-level input noise infusion" (McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30). Because this sector is dominated by a small number of large employers in any given area, published small-area values are more sensitive to that protection than they would be for a sector with many establishments.
Coverage is jobs subject to state unemployment insurance, plus federal workers from 2010 onward (OnTheMap Data Overview). The reference period is the second quarter of each year.
Two gaps carry through from the published files: Alaska has no workplace data after 2016 and Michigan none after 2021. Tracts there carry no value rather than a zero.
The twenty sector shares sum to one, so a change in this share is always relative to the rest of the local job mix.
Birdseye derives these shares from the sector job counts the Census Bureau publishes; the shares themselves are not a published series.
References#
- 12022 NAICS Manualhttps://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- 2McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-30.pdf
- 3OnTheMap Data Overviewhttps://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/help/onthemap/OnTheMapDataOverview.pdf