In some states, unemployment remains stubbornly high

The economic recovery is leaving millions of people behind, especially those with jobs depending on conventions, tourists and live performances.

“It is a very sad situation. I can see why many lose hope and give up,” said Zuleika Lee, a former trade show model and mixologist in Nevada who’s been without work since last March, when the pandemic shut down the convention centers and bars where she made her living.

The state’s tourism-based economy was still reeling in January, the latest federal figures show. Nevada’s unemployment rate was 8.1%, more than twice the level it was a year earlier. Lee is looking for work in more pandemic-proof fields such as sales and graphic design.

While the nationwide number of workers who have been temporarily laid off has declined sharply, permanent job losses remain stubbornly high—about 3.5 million in February. The permanent job loss category covers people who, like Lee, don’t have a job to return to, and need to find a new one when the economy reopens completely.

At the height of the jobless crisis in April, 78% of the then 23 million unemployed Americans were temporarily laid off and only 9% were in the permanent loss category. As of last month, more than a third of the remaining 10 million unemployed were in the permanent loss category.

Those 3.5 million people total more than twice the pre-pandemic number of 1.3 million in February 2020, according to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Economists warn that that increase will slow the recovery, leaving states looking for ways to retrain workers or get them into college, and to keep additional workers from losing jobs by creating job-sharing arrangements.

As shutdowns linger for some groups, “a growing share of unemployment will consist of people in persistent categories of joblessness, thereby slowing the overall recovery,” economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco warned in November.

That state of affairs is part of a pattern that’s reached crisis proportions during the pandemic. Low-skill jobs in tourism and in restaurants near office buildings, high-skill jobs in the arts that require live audiences and donations, factory jobs making airplane parts—all could evaporate, move or just take too long to return after a year of shutdowns.

Hawaii remains the most affected state, the only one with more than 10% of jobs that existed in January 2020 still gone this year. The number of jobless people in Hawaii is five times what it was last year, also the worst among states. State-by-state numbers on permanent job losses are unavailable, but California, Connecticut, Maryland, Nevada and Vermont have lost nearly a tenth of the overall jobs they had last year.

Two states have bucked the trend. Idaho attracted people who could work remotely during the pandemic and wanted the state’s wide-open spaces. South Dakota kept people employed because pandemic restrictions didn’t temporarily close businesses, as they did in every other state—though that strategy might have contributed to its relatively high numbers of COVID-19 deaths per capita. Those were the only two states with more jobs in January than the year before.