NY-area jobless plunge

Nearly 50% from ’20

The unemployment rate in the New York City-NewarkJersey City metro area fell to 8 percent in July, cut nearly in half from a year ago as the region mounted a robust recovery in the labor market, the feds said Wednesday.

The metro area booked an unemployment rate of 15.4 percent at the same time last year, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the Bureau of Labor statistics.

But the data come from before the Delta variant sent daily new cases of COVID-19 surging again, said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.

“We’re not out of the woods yet, and we don’t know how these chapters are going to be written in the coming months. As with the nation, the impact of COVID continues to be key,” he said in a phone interview with The Post.

The New York area’s jobless rate is still higher than the 5.7 percent national rate, but lower than other major cities, including the Los Angeles area, which had a July unemployment rate of 9.3 percent, according to federal data.

Still, other big cities look to be in better shape employment-wise. The San Francisco area saw an unemployment rate of 5.8 percent in July while the Boston area reported 5.3 percent.

But, Hamrick noted, New York City was also hit much harder than those metro areas from the economic fallout of the early months of the pandemic because the Big Apple relies more on tourism and industries like Broadway that screeched to a halt.

Those sectors, along with business travel, have largely yet to come back, he added, which is likely holding back the labor-market recovery in New York.

But on a net level, the New York City area added 558,300 new jobs in July from a year earlier, more than any other US metro area in the country.

Bureau of Labor Statistics chief regional economist Martin Kohli noted that the year-over-year job growth in the New York area came in at 6.5 percent, beating the 5.3 percent nationwide figure.

Most of those 200,800 new city jobs came from leisure and hospitality, the area hardest hit by the pandemic.

Education and health services added 125,700 jobs, with most coming from health care and social assistance, the data showed, and professional and business services picked up 81,700 jobs.

But the picture of economic recovery in the New York City area actually isn’t quite as rosy as federal data show, New School economist James Parrott told The Post.

Parrott prefers data from the New York state Department of Labor, which tracks unemployment data for New York City alone, separated from Newark, Jersey City and the surrounding suburbs.

The state says the city unemployment rate dropped to 10.5 percent in July, from 18.5 percent a year earlier.

But the city’s unemployment rate fell only 0.1 percent from the prior month, and Parrott said that with COVID-19 cases up, he expects the August numbers to “not look very good for New York City.”