December 6 is National Miners Day

December 6 is National Miners Day, celebrating workers who provide products essential to fulfilling America's most vital needs. The mining sector represented approximately 574,200 jobs, or 0.4 percent of all total nonfarm employment in 2022, and contributed 1.9 percent to GDP.  

Labor productivity is a measure of how efficiently hours of work are converted into outputs. In the mining sector and its major industries, labor productivity grew in most business cycles over the past few decades, though it declined in the 2000-07 period for all but support activities for mining. During the current business cycle, productivity grew in the mining sector and across all three major industries within mining.

During the 2007-19 business cycle, mining had the second largest labor productivity increase of the 21 major industries in the economy. Its growth continued in the 2019-2022 period. 

When taking a closer look at the more recent years, gains in mining were led by increased productivity in the oil and gas extraction industry, which trended sharply upward from 2012 to 2021 before decreasing in 2022. Between 2012-22, labor productivity grew 11.1 percent, as output increased 5.7 percent while hours worked in the industry declined 4.8 percent. From 2007-22 labor productivity grew 6.4 percent.

Offsetting swings have kept productivity relatively steady over the past two business cycles in the coal mining and nonmetallic mining industries—two subsets of the major industry mining, except oil and gas. The productivity index for metal ore mining—the remaining subset—declined slightly in 2011 and 2012 but has been fairly steady since. 

Productivity in support activities for mining peaked in 2014 before falling in the next two years. It rebounded after 2016.

These data are from the Productivity program.  To learn more, see our charts, data tables and "Productivity and Costs by Industry: Manufacturing and Mining Industries —2022."