San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
The unemployed
As we celebrate Labor Day weekend, COVID-19’S economic toll continues to cut a wide swath through region’s workforce
It was only six months ago that San Diego County’s economy was humming, its jobless rate — just 3.1 percent — was approaching an historic low, and many employers were struggling to find workers to fill vacant positions. And then the unthinkable happened. The global spread of the deadly novel coronavirus forced a countywide lockdown in late March, requiring the sudden shuttering of huge numbers of businesses.
Within less than a month, more than 290,000 workers had lost their jobs as a result of COVID-19, an analysis by the San Diego Association of Governments concluded. And by early May, an unprecedented one in four workers had become jobless — easily surpassing the Great Recession’s peak unemployment rate of 11.1 percent a decade ago.
“There is nothing comparable to this in the history of San Diego,” said Ray Major, chief economist for SANDAG, which took a deep dive into state and federal data in order to more accurately tally San Diego’s job losses. “In the Great Depression, it took years to end up with 25 percent unemployment, and with this particular pandemic, it took a matter of weeks.”
While the unemployment rate has eased in recent months — it’s now 14.2 percent, according to SANDAG — the pandemic’s economic toll continues to cut a wide swath through San Diego’s workforce, from restaurant cooks, hotel housekeepers and event planners to musicians, accountants, janitors and medical receptionists.
It’s also had an outsized impact on certain areas of the county where lower-paid service sector workers tend to live — central San Diego neighborhoods like Logan Heights, Golden Hill and City Heights, as well as National City, San Ysidro and portions of Vista and Oceanside, SANDAG’S analysis found.
Similarly, workers in certain racial and ethnic groups have been hit harder than their White counterparts. Sixty-three percent of Latinos and 58 percent of Blacks live in county ZIP codes with higher than average unemployment, compared with 43 percent of Whites.
Even as parts of the San Diego economy reopen again and businesses welcome more customers this Labor Day weekend, the outlook for a return to full employment, believes Major, remains grim.
“When this pandemic first started, everyone thought it would be just a speed bump in the road,” he said. “But we’re now moving into a period of time with almost half a year of unemployment rates that are unprecedented, and there’s no end in sight to these numbers coming down.”