San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F., Bay Area add jobs, but lag nation in recovery
Bay Area business hiring has come charging back over the last year, but the region still lags behind the rest of the state and the country in recouping jobs lost because of the pandemic, dating to April 2020.
That is despite the region adding 24,500 jobs in February and outpacing the nation in job growth over the past 12 months, according to an analysis of state employment data from the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.
The country as a whole saw 4.6% job growth from February 2021 through February 2022, while the Bay Area saw hiring jump by 6.4% in that period.
Despite that strong showing, the region has only recovered about three-quarters of the jobs lost from February to April 2020 when the shelter-in-place order put the local and national economies into a deep freeze. Nationwide, the country has gained back more than 90% of those jobs lost, as other parts of the country were quicker to lift pandemic masking and distancing rules, sometimes trading higher viral transmissions for more economic activity.
San Francisco has had particular trouble recouping its pandemic job losses, recovering just over 70% of the jobs lost during the early months of the pandemic. That is significantly less than Oakland and San Jose, which have each gotten back just under 80% of the jobs lost because of COVID-19’s economic bite.
Part of the explanation could be San Francisco’s heavy reliance on tourism and hospitality as an economic engine, an industry that has been seeing gains in hotel occupancy and visits but is not back to its pre-pandemic form.
The analysis found that while the manufacturing, transportation and warehousing industries actually exceeded pre-pandemic job levels in February 2022 as demand for those services rose, the Bay Area’s leisure and hospitality sector got back only about 64.7% of lost jobs by last month.
The Bay Area’s unemployment rate was 3.4% in February compared with 2.7% before the pandemic. The latest national jobs report showed employers adding 431,000 nonfarm jobs in March, with the unemployment rate declining to 3.6%.
Janette Rosales (left) attends a job fair for San Francisco Ferry Building businesses in June.