Finding new jobs has not been easy for anyone looking to find a job in San Francisco.
According to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce dashboard, which uses data from labor market analyst Emsi, job vacancies from employers looking to hire in the city fell 24.1 percent in December from the pre-pandemic. The good news: That was better than the 43.3 percent drop in listings in July.
“We expect these numbers to return, but that doesn’t mean they will go back to where they were before,” said Justin Rietz, assistant professor of economics at San Jose State University, “quickly out of the pandemic job crisis.
The San Francisco-San Mateo area, hit by a brain drain and a sharp drop in tourism, has recovered only 13.3 percent of the 187,500 jobs lost last year, according to an analysis by the state employment development news organization. For comparison, Santa Clara County regained 30.7% of the 153,600 jobs it cut, and East Bay regained 39.7% of the 196,200 jobs it lost.
Vacancies in the San Francisco real estate sector were down in half in December from a year earlier, the chamber said. Administrative and other management services fell 7,393 job openings (-40 percent), most in San Francisco, while the arts and entertainment sectors lost the highest percentage of job openings (-68 percent), followed by accommodation and catering services (-53 percent ) and wholesale (-51 percent).
One thing remained clear: “The decline in technology is nowhere near as large as in the other sectors,” said Rietz, who co-published the Silicon Valley Economic Dashboard at San Jose State University, which examined employment trends by sector and other branches of the economy Indicators in the metropolitan area of San Jose.
Tech aside, Silicon Valley’s construction sector, which lost nearly 19,000 jobs in March 2020 when the Bay Area became the first to close in the nation, had regained nearly 15,000 of those jobs by June, according to the state of San Jose. But the sector suffered another slight decline in employment in December. The retail sector in South Bay, Silicon Valley, employed 5,730 fewer workers than before the pandemic, and the hospitality sector fell by more than 25,000 jobs in December.
The Silicon Valley Organization said they didn’t have enough job posting data to share or comment on. The Oakland Chamber of Commerce did not respond to requests for information.
