It’s the best time in 50 years to look for a job in California.
That’s the view of Michael Bernick, who used to run the state’s unemployment agency, an analysis largely echoed by other economists and backed by data.
Many of those jobs are in the hospitality and tourism industries, where California employment still has not reached pre-COVID pandemic levels.
“There are lots of service jobs available, but businesses can’t hire enough workers to meet the demand,” said Sung Won Sohn, president of Los Angeles-based SS Economics, a consulting firm.
California has been filling jobs quickly. Its unemployment rate in April, the latest data available, was 4.6%, down from 8.3% a year earlier. The state has gained 925,000 payroll jobs in the previous 12 months, for a total of 17.4 million jobs.
In the Sacramento area alone, for example, roughly 7,600 jobs were gained in April.
The area saw growth in leisure and hospitality, but also in education, health services and government jobs. Labor Market Consultant Cara Welch with the California Employment Development Department said the region has recovered the number of jobs lost during the pandemic, and then some.
“We’re following the same trend as the nation, we’re bouncing back since the pandemic occurred,” Welch said. The Sacramento area has recovered 102% of the jobs lost since March 2020.
But the state also had nearly 1.3 million job openings in March, seasonally adjusted, up from 779,000 a year earlier, according to preliminary data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And hiring was roughly the same — 656,000 in March 2022 and 646,000 in March 2021.
The data are “consistent with employer reports that they can’t find workers,” said Bernick, now an employment attorney with Duane Morris LLP.
Leisure and hospitality got hit hard during the pandemic, which remains a key reason job openings are plentiful.
The state’s Employment Development Department reported 1.88 million payroll jobs in the industry in April, up 331,700 from a year ago and 20,100 from a month earlier. Increases in full-service restaurant employment were a key driver of the increase.
The numbers, though, were still below the 2.05 million leisure and hospitality jobs of February 2020, the month before the pandemic hit.
Why are there so many openings?
It’s difficult to pinpoint precise reasons for all the openings. Throughout last year and early this year, some experts saw increased unemployment benefits and government stimulus payments as reducing motivation to seek work.
But higher unemployment benefits ended in September, and the maximum benefit, which at one point reached $1,050 weekly, has been $450 a week. The last federal stimulus payment program was enacted in March 2021, and monthly child tax credits ended in December.
Some sectors have roared back creating and filling jobs, notably blue collar work such as construction, HVAC technicians and truck driving.
But other industries lag.
“Even employers with white collar jobs in tech, business services, and health care report far fewer job candidates than prior to the pandemic,” Bernick said.
Ray Perryman, president of a Texas-based economic consulting firm, cited demographic and immigration patterns as a reason for the labor shortage. Many new immigrants often take lower skilled jobs as they climb the economic ladder, but this country has tightened its immigration laws in recent years.
Restaurant owners, notably in San Francisco, have said that in recent months they could not find many of their support staff, who had apparently left the high-cost area.
And, said Bernick, “millennials do seem to be looking at other fields, especially those that appear to have other labor market options.”
