New York State is lagging behind the rest of the nation in recovering jobs lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. Forced government shutdowns decimated the private sector and many jobs disappeared as businesses could not withstand the long shutdown.
The United States, generally speaking, returned to pre-COVID job levels by 2022 – two years after the March 2020 outbreak. By contrast, New York did not recover until March 2024, two years after the much of the nation.
A study on job recovery done by the Empire Center points out that New York was 39th out of 50 states in pandemic job recovery. “Among large industrial states, only Illinois ranked lower, with no net job growth during the period. By contrast, job growth came to 10 percent in Texas and 11 percent in Florida; even California, whose pandemic restrictions rivaled New York’s, has experienced three times New York’s rate of job growth,” says the study.
According to the New York State Labor Department, in July 2024 private employment in New York was just 0.8 percent above pre-COVID levels. Sluggish job recovery, coupled with a big dent in average New York’s pockets due to high inflation, makes for a tough economic story for many families.
Add to that, Suffolk County’s unemployment rate ticked up to 3.90% in August, compared to 3.40% last month. Families in Suffolk County are still suffering from COVID job losses and flawed post-pandemic “economic recovery’ schemes coming out of the Biden-Harris White House that fueled record-high inflation rates.
New York’s recovery was also not evenly distributed across the state and some regions fared better – most especially New York City and near suburbs.
“Including the city’s suburban counties in the lower Hudson Valley and Long Island, the downstate region as a whole gained the most jobs. The job count in the remaining 50 counties in New York—comprising upstate as broadly defined—was still below the July 2019 level,” says the Empire Center report.
Empire Center’s EJ McMahon says, “ (New York’s) job recovery has also been among the weakest compared to other states.” Texas and Florida outpaced the Empire State and even California, whose pandemic restrictions rivaled New York’s, has experienced three times New York’s rate of job growth.”
General economic conditions and the affordability crisis in New York drive people out. Crime also plays a role.
The overall job recovery in New York is lagging dramatically behind, and New York State Conservative Party Chairman, Gerry Kassar says, “That's largely due to the tax and business environment in New York.”
Kassar says, “A professional job in the New York City area can pay quite a bit but it does get eaten up by a variety of the government cost factors and private sector cost factors because you're paying higher taxes, higher rents right, everything is higher.”
“I think New York State is a good place to get an education and then it’s the place to leave to get a job, an affordable home, and lifestyle. These factors are leading service industry jobs, which are not well-paying jobs, to be increasingly dominant in New York State,” says Kassar.
“The jobs lag is due to companies that provide good jobs physically leaving the state. In some cases, individuals who were paying a ‘commuter tax’ by working in New York City can work at home out of Connecticut or New Jersey. These workers who formerly lived in NY, can now have the same job and live in a more affordable place with lower crime.”
Kassar adds, “There may be very little difference in the life of workers, as far as their interaction with their job, but there would be a significant difference as New York State perceives that role because they are really not working in New York State anymore. They are working out of a remote location which has been encouraged since COVID.”
When fewer people are working ‘in the office’, the trickle-down effect of job loss moves to all the ancillary businesses such as coffee and lunch spots as well as any other business that thrives in a busy business district.
Nationally, Americans are seeing full-time jobs evaporate and part-time jobs grow.
“All of the net job growth in Aug was part-time employment (+527k), while full-time jobs plummeted (-438k); we're hemorrhaging higher-paying jobs w/ benefits and replacing them with multiple part-time ones - these higher payroll numbers are a sign of impoverishment, not growth,” says EJ Antonin Ph.D.
Many people have 2 or more part-time jobs to make ends meet. Adding to that is that native-born Americans are suffering job loss disproportionally as non-native-born people become employed at growing rates.
Additionally, “August jobs report shows more pain for native-born Americans, who've lost more than 1.3 million jobs over the last year, while foreign-born workers have gained over 1.2 million jobs - the American worker has been left behind in this ‘recovery’”, Antoni says.
More than half of all jobs created in the past 12 months have been government jobs or government-related jobs in health care and, according to Antoni, are ”not at all sustainable”.