By: Hellen Zaboulani
New York City is back on track, adding jobs at a steady pace last month. As reported by Crain’s NY, the job gains mostly stemmed from hiring in restaurants and hotels as the city begins to open back up. Higher-paying jobs in Wall Street, however, continue to be scarce. In May, NYC employers added 41,300 positions, as almost all coronavirus-related restrictions were lifted state-wide. Still, the total jobs in the city are well behind the pre-pandemic peak of 4.7 million, lagging by roughly half a million.
The figures from May indicate that the city added jobs faster than the rest of the country last month, as it worked to catch up with the nationwide recovery which started sooner in other states. The unemployment rate in the city declined to 10.9 percent, down from 11.4 percent in April. The national unemployment rate is now at 5.5 percent.
Over half of the new jobs were in the leisure and hospitality industry such as entertainment, recreation, hotels and food services. There was a 21% increase in these jobs since April, but the total number of jobs in the sector for May was still 273,100, which is only two-thirds of the number of jobs in February 2020.
Restaurants led the recovery, adding 11,000 jobs a reflection of people’s readiness to go out to eat again. In fact, some eateries have revealed that their business is better now even than before the pandemic, thanks to the added outdoor seating, and steady delivery businesses which bloomed during the shutdown.
Hotels are recovering at a much slower pace. Most hotels “are opening with limited occupancy, and many of those that are reopening are limiting amenities, most notably food and beverage,” he said. International tourism has still not opened back up. Overall, hotel occupancy citywide is only at 40%, said Rich Maroko, president of the Hotel Trades Council. That is half what the occupancy had been pre-pandemic, in the same period in 2019.
In the meantime, financial-industry jobs are still declining, with 2,200 fewer jobs than the same time last year. In continuing with the shift of banking giants fleeing the city, this week Goldman Sachs announced it would move 100 traders from New York to a new office in Palm Beach, Florida.
Wall Street will play a significant part in the recovery as the securities industry accounts for a fifth of private-sector wages in NYC. This is despite the fact that it only accounts for about 5 percent of jobs, as per state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.
