Health Care Hiring Pushes Employment to New Heights

New York City continues to add jobs at the same pace as the rest of the country, finally putting the pandemic downturn in the rear view mirror, spurred primarily by a a surge in health-care hiring.

New data released Thursday by the state labor department shows that employment increased by 32,500 in the first four months of the year to a record 4,735,600 jobs.

The unemployment rate fell by 0.1 percentage points to 4.8%. The national jobless rate is 3.6%.

Here are four key takeaways on the city’s economy.

Optimism from some experts, caution from others

The Independent Budget Office this week forecast the city will gain 91,000 jobs this year, 20,000 more than the administration of Mayor Eric Adams predicts. The city comptroller’s latest projection is expected next week, but in December its forecast for this year was only 27,000.

While the city finally recovered all the jobs lost in the pandemic recession earlier this year the IBO notes the country as whole is now 4% above its pre-pandemic employment level.

“New York is still playing catch-up,” said Sarah Parker, the agency’s senior researcher and strategy officer. “There are still a lot of jobs to gain in retail trade and leisure and hospitality.”

Those two sectors are 80,000 positions below April 2019.

Watch the Black unemployment rate

Two weeks ago, Mayor Eric Adams held a press conference to “celebrate” a decline in the city’s Black unemployment rate in the first three months of the year to 7.9%. The figure had been as high as 15% in 2022 .

The 7.9% rate is the lowest since 2019. However, the national Black unemployment rate is 5.6%.

Another quarter of improvement would signal sustained progress, notes James Parrott, an economist at the New School.

Debipriya Chatterjee, an economist at of the Community Service Society, notes that the group’s survey of low-income New Yorkers shows that 45% of Black households with children say they are unable to afford child care, 20% do not have access to high-speed internet, 30% find it hard to pay subway and bus fares and 11% are behind on their rent.

The story has all been about health care

Health care and social assistance jobs have soared in recent years, with employment in that sector up by 137,000 from its pre-pandemic level. The mayor’s executive budget shows that during parts of 2023, the home health care and individual and family service sectors accounted for all the gains in private-sector jobs.

Experts note that those jobs are part-time and don’t pay very much, so their economic impact is much less than other employment.

The administration’s official forecast expects growth in those areas to slow sharply in coming years, in part because of efforts in Albany to reduce spending on a program that allows Medicaid recipients in need of home care to hire their relatives and friends. IBO says Albany’s changes are mostly administrative and that the program will continue to grow, if at a slower pace.

Three areas to worry about: Motion pictures, tech and Wall Street

Despite the end of strikes by writers and actors, movie production employment in the city has been slow to rebound, with the total near 42,000 in April. The number of direct production jobs reached 58,000 in the months before the strike.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average may have topped 40,000 for the first time, but employment on Wall Street has begun to sag as large layoffs, especially at Citigroup, begin to show up in the numbers, with employment dropping by 7,000 so far this year.

While New York has been spared the brunt of layoffs at big tech companies, one major tech sector, computer and related activities, is down 4,000 jobs over the past year with no uptick in sight.

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