New York City’s Jobs Recovery Is Still Unbalanced
Office jobs have held up, but hospitality and retail are still down. Can a boom in health-care jobs help even things out?
Home health-care jobs are surging in New York City.
Photographer: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
In February, New York City came a little bit closer to clawing back all of the estimated 962,400 jobs it lost at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s not there yet: Even as US nonfarm payroll employment has risen 2% above where it was in February 2020, New York’s remains 0.9% lower.
The epic job destruction in New York City in spring 2020 was focused on work that had to be performed in person, with the biggest losses coming in leisure and hospitality but also large ones in retail, health care, other services and construction (yes, the chart says “mining, logging and construction” because that’s how it’s reported in the monthly employment data, but other sources indicate that construction accounts for 99.5% of those jobs in New York City).