Bay Area job market reaches record high

Tech hiring in East Bay, South Bay fuels the employment growth

The Bay Area job market surged to record peaks of employment in February, fueled by robust tech hiring in the East Bay and South Bay, state labor officials reported Friday.

During February, the Bay Area added 6,000 jobs, an upswing led by the East Bay with a gain of 3,500 jobs and the South Bay with an addition of 2,100 positions, according to the state’s Employment Development Department. Meanwhile, the San Francisco-San Mateo region was unchanged with flat job activity. All the numbers were adjusted for seasonal factors.

“The Bay Area is off to a very strong start this year,” said Robert Kleinhenz, an economist and executive director of research with Beacon Economics. “We are seeing some very nice job gains in the Bay Area.”

California gained 14,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, and the statewide jobless rate fell to 4.3 percent in February, compared with 4.4 percent in January. February’s California rate is the lowest on record in a data series that began in 1976, the EDD reported.

The technology sector appears to have spurred much of the growth in the Bay Area, this news organization’s analysis of information compiled by

Beacon Economics shows.

In the three main urban centers with tech jobs in the Bay Area — consisting of Santa Clara County, the San Francisco-San Mateo metro area and the East Bay — 3,400 technology jobs were added. That represents about 61 percent of the 5,600 jobs added last month in those three areas, and 57 percent of the 6,000 jobs gained in the nine-county Bay Area.

“The tech industry is still the main engine of the Bay Area economy; technology companies are still moving forward with hiring and expansion,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

And the tech industry should continue to fuel employment growth in the region. In recent days, this news organization revealed that Menlo Parkbased Facebook had leased three big office buildings in Sunnyvale, totaling about 1 million square feet, enough room for 5,000 to 6,000 employees. Mountain View-based Google is busy with major expansion plans in Sunnyvale and downtown San Jose. Cupertinobased Apple has assembled 85 acres of north San Jose land, where it could build

a major campus, and in recent months moved into its new circular Apple Park campus.

“It seems as if every few days there is word of a tech company in Silicon Valley leasing offices or buying properties,” Levy said.

The East Bay’s strongest industries in February were administrative and support services, a category that includes clerical and maintenance jobs, which added 1,400 positions, and retail, which gained 800, according to information provided by Beacon.

The South Bay’s most robust industry, along with tech, was health care, which added 1,000 jobs.

The hotel and restaurant industry was particularly weak in February, losing 1,800 jobs in the San Francisco-San Mateo region, 1,500 in the East Bay and 1,400 in the South Bay, Beacon reported.

“Most of the job growth so far this year is in higherpaying industries such as technology,” said Jeffrey Michael, director of the Stockton-based Center for Business and Policy Research at University of the Pacific.

It’s a different story for industries that tend to have modest or lower wages, Michael said.

“Where things are the most stagnant in terms of job growth are the lowerpaying sectors, but that probably has more to do with availability of labor rather than a lack of demand by employers for those kinds of jobs,” Michael said.

The sturdy gains during the early stages of 2018 appear to have banished fears that the Bay Area could tumble into a slowdown. For the first threefourths of 2017, growth was sluggish and peppered with months of job losses, which raised the specter of an economic downtown.

The biggest fears of a slump centered on Santa Clara County, whose job growth last spring, measured by employment gains over a one-year period, had slipped to a gain of just 1.9 percent, a far cry from a few years ago, when the South Bay steadily posted employment expansions at a rate of 4 percent to 5 percent on an annualized basis.

More recently, job growth over the 12 months that ended in February reached 2.9 percent in Santa Clara County, a big improvement over the pace from last April.

What’s more, Santa Clara County’s employment growth over the oneyear period of 2.9 percent topped the pace of employment expansion in the United States, up 1.6 percent; California, up 2.3 percent; the Bay Area and East Bay, up 2.2 percent; and the San Francisco-San Mateo area, up 1.8 percent.

“Even with a tight job market, companies are still hiring and adding to their job counts,” Kleinhenz said. “They are continuing to find employees.”

Contact George Avalos at 408-859-5167.