This is a great point, employment stats are not the same across all PhDs.

Back in the early 2000's organic chemistry PhDs were in very high demand. Salaries went from ~$70K/yr to start to over $100K/yr by 2005 or so.

Since 2005 two things have happened: (1) as mentioned above, a lot of off-shoring of basic research has happened, particularly to China and India (not saying this is good or bad) and (2) a shift by the biotech industry away from small molecule drugs to biologic drugs (antibodies and other proteins).

The result is that organic chemistry PhDs have been hit pretty hard while PhDs with knowledge areas that support biologic drug development have done pretty well.