As the fifth Labor Day weekend since the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak approaches, most New York regions have yet to regain the private-sector jobs lost as a result of pandemic lockdowns. What’s more, New York State is lagging far behind the rest of the U.S., according to the latest state and federal labor statistics.

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

New York’s employment recovery has also been one of the weakest compared to other states. As shown below, the Empire State’s employment growth since February 2020 ranks 39th out of 50 states. Among major industrial states, only Illinois ranks lower, with no net job growth during the period. By contrast, job growth was 10 percent in Texas and 11 percent in Florida; even California, where pandemic restrictions rivaled New York’s, has three times Employment growth in New York.

A tilted job map

New York’s recovery has been notably uneven at the regional level. If we shift our focus to the difference in non-seasonally adjusted monthly job numbers for July of this year and the same month in 2019, before the pandemic, all Of the state’s net gain — and then some — came in New York City, where private employment rose by 141,500. Including the city’s suburbs in the Lower Hudson Valley and Long Island, the Downstate region as a whole gained 167,200 jobs. The number of jobs in New York’s other 50 counties — including the broad Upstate — was still up 36,400 below the July 2019 level.

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

In July, the number of health care jobs statewide was 1.4 million, up 161,300, or 11 percent, from the same month in 2019. That represented 107 percent of the state’s total private sector job growth — meaning that, excluding health care, private employment in all other sectors declined.

Within the healthcare sector, employment growth varies greatly by type of healthcare provider and by region.

• Employment in home care continues to grow explosively, with an increase of 109,000 or 41 percent over the past five years.
• Hospital employment has also increased since July 2019, but by a more modest rate of 21,200 or 5 percent.
• Meanwhile, nursing home jobs fell by 18,200, or 15 percent, as the pandemic sparked a prolonged decline.

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