State ended 2021 with more jobs, still short of pre-pandemic levels

Long Island’s economy added over 30,000 jobs in December compared with the end of 2020, though the region’s overall recovery remains slow and has shown job losses in nursing home employment, according to state data.

Despite job gains throughout 2021, the Island remains 95,600 jobs below job counts recorded in December 2019 before the start of the pandemic. The Island added 2,600 jobs on a month-over-month basis in December.

The drop-off in jobs from before the pandemic to now has remained stubbornly high, but it has been shrinking since the start of last year, economists said.

The recent jobs data, released Thursday by the state Labor Department, shows that the Island is still recovering from the record-breaking loss of 270,700 jobs since April 2020 in the aftermath of the pandemic’s emergence.

"The region’s job count ended the year at 7% below pre-pandemic levels, reflecting some progress from the beginning of the year when we were 9% below where we were prior to the pandemic," said Shital Patel, labor market analyst in the Labor Department’s Hicksville office.

One factor complicating the region’s recovery has been its smaller labor force compared with pre-pandemic levels. The labor force refers to the sum of all employed and unemployed Long Islanders looking for work.

"It’s likely that has been playing a part in the region’s sluggish job growth," Patel said.

The rise of omicron combined with intermittent school closures has "brought child care issues back to the forefront" as parents who may have planned to return to the workforce find themselves supervising remote schooling.

Additionally, many older workers, having seen soaring stock market portfolios and rising real estate values, may now have a cushion that is letting some retire earlier than they had planned.

Those with health concerns may also be waiting on the sidelines of the job market, and in some cases, may be choosing to retire earlier, said Gregory DeFreitas, senior labor economics professor at Hofstra University and director of the Center for Labor and Democracy.

Another factor, DeFreitas said, has to do with workers willingness to go back to the types of jobs they may have worked in prior to the pandemic, especially those who worked in lower-paying, consumer-facing positions.

"We see that the Long Island job market is slowly regaining the massive job losses of the initial lockdown period in 2020," said DeFreitas. "But within that broad trend there’s still a lot of volatility in narrower sectors."

Clothing stores, as an example, saw double-digit job growth on an annual basis, growing 16.2% in December on a year-over-year basis, an "above normal" jump up for the sector, even considering normal holiday hiring increases. At the same time, jobs in nursing homes saw a drop of 4% over the same 12-month period, a trend that seems counter to the region's ongoing health care needs.

"That speaks to the uncertainty and unpredictability that both workers and employers are dealing with," DeFreitas said. "And now, of course, omicron has introduced more uncertainty."

The jobs data shows that leisure and hospitality, the sector most hurt by early pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, has seen the biggest jump in jobs over the 12 months ending last month.

Aided largely by increases in bar and restaurant hiring, the overall leisure sector increased job counts by 14.3%, or 13,200 jobs last month from the same month in 2020.