Businesses of all kinds are reopening and recruiting back employees, many of whom were laid off more than a year ago when the pandemic hit, as New York City recovers from the deep recession triggered by the sudden lockdown in March 2020.According to data from the New York State Labor Department, which announced on Thursday that New York City’s official unemployment rate fell marginally to 11.4 percent in April from 11.7 percent in March, the rebound has been building for a few months.
Restaurants, which added 15,000 workers last month, is one of the clearest signs of recovery. Last month, the city’s full-service restaurants had three times as many staff as they did in April 2020, when they were at their lowest point.“We have two very powerful powers at work in the restaurants,” said Barbara Byrne Denham, senior economist at Oxford Economics. “Most of them have been given permission to reopen, and many people are ready to eat out again.”
With the employment growth in April, New York has recovered about 375,000 of the jobs it lost last spring, or about 40% of the total. Economists estimate that regaining the balance of those lost jobs — already more than 500,000 — would take at least a couple of years.Still, New York has a long way to go to get back to the normalcy that existed before the pandemic. Before the city’s sudden lockdown, which forced most companies to shut, the city’s economy had been on a decade-long upswing, producing more jobs and lower unemployment than at any other time in history.
The city’s official unemployment rate had been below 4% for 11 months in a row, and wages had been steadily increasing for many years. Then, almost overnight, the bustling metropolis fell silent as legions of workers were sent home to survive the pandemic’s spread.Last spring, nearly all of the city’s job gains from a record-length expansion that began in 2009 were erased in just two months, wiping out nearly all of the city’s job gains. In May, the city’s official unemployment rate soared to 20%, making it one of the highest in the world.
The city’s official unemployment rate had been below 4% for 11 months in a row, and wages had been steadily increasing for many years. Then, almost overnight, the bustling metropolis fell silent as legions of workers were sent home to survive the pandemic’s spread.Last spring, nearly all of the city’s job gains from a record-length expansion that began in 2009 were erased in just two months, wiping out nearly all of the city’s job gains. In May, the city’s official unemployment rate soared to 20%, making it one of the highest in the world.
New York and its tourist-dependent industries, such as museums, theatres, and hotels, were hit particularly hard by the pandemic. Many companies in those sectors have not reopened or rehired many employees as foreign and business travel remain stalled.
