Approaching the fifth Labor Day weekend since the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, most regions of New York have yet to recover the private-sector jobs lost in the wake of pandemic lockdowns—and the Empire State trails far behind the rest of the U.S., according to the latest state and federal labor statistics.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, the state Labor Department in July estimated total private employment at 8.4 million jobs, just 67,800 (0.8 percent) above the February 2020 level.  While the nation as a whole recovered its pandemic job losses within two years of the March 2020 outbreak, New York didn’t match its pre-pandemic employment level until March of this year, as shown below.

New York’s job recovery has also been among the weakest compared to other states.  As shown below, the Empire State’s employment growth since February 2020 ranked 39th out of 50 states.  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.

A tilted job map

New York’s recovery has been notably unbalanced on a regional basis. Shifting the focus to the difference in non-seasonally adjusted monthly job counts for July of this year and the same month back in 2019, before the pandemic, all of the state’s net gain —and then some—occurred in New York City, where private employment rose by 141,500.  Including the city’s suburban counties in the lower Hudson Valley and Long Island, the downstate region as a whole gained 167,200 jobs.  The job count in the remaining 50 counties in New York—comprising upstate as broadly defined—was still 36,400 below the July 2019 level.

Bill Hammond, the Empire Center’s senior fellow for health policy, notes that healthcare jobs in particular have bounced back from the pandemic much more robustly than the state’s overall employment level. From Bill’s take on the job numbers:

As of July, the number of healthcare jobs statewide was 1.4 million, up 161,300 or 11 percent since the same month in 2019. That equated to 107 percent of the state’s total private sector job growth – meaning that, excluding healthcare, private employment in all other sectors declined.

Within the healthcare sector, employment growth has varied widely by provider type and by region.

• Employment in home health care services has continued to explode, jumping by 109,000 or 41 percent in the past five years.
• Hospital employment also has risen since July 2019, but by a more modest 21,200 or 5 percent.
• Nursing home employment, meanwhile, declined by 18,200 or 15 percent, as the pandemic disruption sharpened a long-term decline.

Regionally, like total employment, growth in the health sector has been overwhelmingly concentrated in New York City, which accounted for 98 percent of statewide healthcare job increases since 2019—including 136 percent of hospital growth (in other words, the city added hospital jobs while the rest of the state was shedding them); and 87 percent of home health growth. At the same time, the city absorbed a disproportionately small 24 percent share of the nursing home job losses.