The Big Apple added jobs at an agonizingly slow pace last month as it still struggles to cope with a roughly 300,000-person drop in its workforce since the pandemic, troubling new data reveals.
The latest employment figures show the city gained 13,500 jobs for December, but the number still leaves Gotham about 12% short of even matching its pre-pandemic level, according to new labor statistics and an analysis by The City.
New York City was the nation’s metro area hardest hit by the pandemic and lost a total of nearly 1 million jobs in March and April 2020, with the biggest drain by far occurring in Manhattan. It currently has a little over 4 million workers.
“The city’s job losses as of the fall of 2022 — two-and-a-half years after the pandemic’s onset — stem mostly from the employment decline in lower-paid, face-to-face industries most immediately affected by public health business restrictions and subject to the lingering effects of changed commuting and hybrid working patterns,’’ according to a just-released study by the New School and others.
Gotham’s still-addled workforce is only cementing previous dire predictions by city officials that the Apple won’t get back to its pre-pandemic levels for at least several years.
The Mayor’s Budget Office has said it doesn’t expect the city to hit the mark till the end of 2024. Gov. Kathy Hochul has been even more skeptical, predicting this past summer that it could take until 2026.
The worst-hit city industries continue to be hospitality, retail, and construction, while warehouse positions have done the best bouncing back, the study said.
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The Big Apple’s unemployment rate also continued to rise last month. It hit 5.9%, up 0.1% from November and 1.6% higher than the state overall, according to new figures.
The city’s nearly 6% unemployment rate also was significantly more than the country’s overall 3.5% tally.
Still, the city figure was a 1.5% decrease from its December 2021 rate, the new figures show.
Black city residents suffered the highest unemployment rate in the most recent past quarter among people of color, or 9.8%, according to the study and Gothamist.
The jobless rate for city Hispanics topped 7%, and Asian residents suffered twice their previous figure, hitting about 5%.
Those figures are compared to 3.5 percent for whites.
