Hiring surges in Texas
State adds nearly 100K jobs as shots, stimulus boost consumers
Employers across Texas, including those hardest hit by the pandemic, are hiring and rehiring workers as more people get vaccinated and venture out to spend stimulus checks and savings accumulated over a year of hunkering down.
The state economy created nearly 100,000 jobs in March — the most since October — led by restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues that keenly felt the impact of shutdowns, capacity limits, social distancing and just plain fear. In Greater Houston, employers added more than 26,000 jobs, the most since June, the Texas Workforce Commission reported Friday.
“For us, this is a stellar jobs report,” said Parker Harvey, an economist for Gulf Coast Workforce Solutions, a workforce development organization. “If you look at a typical March, it’s well above what we’d expect. It does look that vaccines revving up seems to be working in our
favor.”
The strong employment gains in March represented a rebound from February, when the state shed some 2,400 jobs in the wake of severe winter weather and days of widespread power outages. Those gains are the latest evidence of an accelerating economic recovery driven by millions of vaccinations and hundreds of billions of dollars in federal stimulus money.
On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that first-time claims for unemployment insurance fell by nearly 20,000 in Texas to about 65,000, the lowest level since January. Retail sales surged across the nation in March, jumping nearly 10 percent from February, the Commerce Department reported.
Sales in bars and restaurants jumped more than 13 percent last month, according to the Commerce Department.
In Texas the leisure and hospitality sector, which includes bars, restaurants and hotels, added more than 23,000 jobs in March as employers caught up with pent-up consumer demand, analysts said.
Traveling again
The fast-food chain McDonald’s this week held a three-day event to hire nearly 2,500 workers across the region. Aimbridge Hospitality, a global hotel management company, is looking to fill 1,000 open positions across 58 of its Houston-area hotels, under brands including Hyatt, Marriott International, Hilton, IHG, and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.
“Over the last 12 weeks, we’ve seen great occupancy growth as more people are getting vaccinated and restrictions are lifting,” said Adam Patenaude, vice president of operations for Aimbridge Hospitality.
Occupancy in its hotels in Houston grew to 70 percent from 40 percent at the beginning of the year, Patenaude said.
At the Moran CityCentre hotel in Memorial City, about 40 percent of the hotel’s 150 staff have been hired back, including six people recently added to work in the bar area, said Jamal Mazhar, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing. Occupancy rates are about 90 percent on the weekends, near pre-pandemic levels.
Business travelers also are returning, Mazhar said. Weekday occupancy rates have doubled to 40 percent from 20 percent a month ago.
“We can tell as more people get vaccinated, they are starting to travel again,” Mazhar said. “We noticed that C-level execs are starting to travel, and we are hoping that starts to spread.”
The reawakening of the economy is spreading across industries. Construction added 19,000 jobs in Texas last month while business services gained nearly 15,000, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Retailers added nearly 6,000 jobs
Shellie McBeath, owner of Little Eclectic House, a women’s clothing and jewelry store in Cypress, said she noticed an uptick in foot traffic in her store once vaccines became widely available to all adults.
“We used to just see shoppers come in alone,” McBeath said. “Now we’re having groups of girlfriends come in after getting lunch, and we haven’t really seen that since before the pandemic.”
Hungry for energy
The increased activity is boosting demand for gasoline and other petroleum products, which has pushed oil prices above $60 a barrel. Energy companies added about 5,000 jobs in Texas last month, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.
Oil settled at $63.13 a barrel Friday.
Manufacturing, which is closely tied to the oil and gas industry in Texas, is also growing, adding 7,500 jobs last month. A recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that 28 percent of Texas manufacturers increased employment in March, up 8 percentage points from February.
This all points to what economists have forecast: a strong, post-COVID recovery. By Harvey’s estimates, Houston has regained about half the jobs lost in the pandemic-driven recession.
“We’re moving in the right direction,” he said.