California’s 5.2% Rate Leads the Nation for Four Consecutive Months: Study
A new study shows that California’s job market has been pretty bad lately, with a big drop in private sector jobs since the post-pandemic high point. This is despite gains in the public sector and other jobs that are mostly paid for by public money.
The state Legislative Analyst’s Office looked at job data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics up to April and found that California’s private-sector businesses have lost a total of 340,000 jobs since they were at their busiest a few years ago.
The tech and finance companies lost the most money. The number of jobs in the information business has dropped 16% since its peak. Big companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Disney are among its biggest employers. In July 2022, there were more than 531,000 of these jobs. Now, 98,000 of them are gone. In December 2021, there were 500,000 jobs in the financial business. Since then, 43,000 jobs have been lost, or 8%.
Not only that, but jobs in business services, manufacturing, and transportation and warehousing have all gone down by 3% since their high. The unemployment number in California is 5.2%, which has been the highest in the country for the past four months.
Along with that, Chas Alamo, principal fiscal and policy analyst for the Legislative Analyst’s Office, said on Monday that the healthcare and social service businesses have added 240,000 jobs since September 2022.
Alamo said that this industry includes private companies like dentists, childcare providers, vocational rehabilitation centers, and more. However, it is closely tied to government spending, so he put these jobs in the same category as public-sector jobs, which have grown by 120,000 over the same time period.
The jobs he looked at were based on 12.5 million in the private sector as of April and 5.5 million in the public and publicly funded sectors, which is a pretty even split.
Personal income taxes bring in a lot of money for California, so it’s important to know what kinds of jobs it gets or loses.
Reference: CalMatters
