Regional unemployment rate declined in August

Plus, a lot of updates from around the area

Update since Tuesday: Manfred Keil and Mark Schniepp had an excellent article in the local papers on the regional, and national, labor force situation. Highly recommended as a good overview of the labor supply situation, including the impact of migration patterns. By the way, another source of worker shortage not mentioned by Keil and Schniepp is long Covid, which is keeping as many as 4 million workers nationwide out of work; see the latest analysis from Brookings here.

Statewide, AB 257 (regulating wages and working conditions for food service workers) was passed by the Senate along party lines, although one Republican (from San Diego) also voted for it. This bill will have a major impact on California’s restaurant industry and you will surely see more discussion of it in the coming months; read about the details and current politics of the bill here.

Finally, I was in the media outlet “factchequeado”, out of Florida, fact-checking one of Governor Newsom’s tweets about job growth. This was a fun topic to work on and includes some important insights on state-level jobs numbers. Your browser should allow you to translate that link if necessary.

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The unemployment rate for San Bernardino and Riverside Counties (not seasonally adjusted) fell to 3.9% in July, down from 4.0% in June and down from 8.0% in July 2021. See the graphic below for a regional snapshot. You can see several coastal counties with mid-to-upper-2’s, but as Keil and Schniepp point out, a big part of the low unemployment rates in those areas is due to the fact that many workers have just “vanished” and are therefore not showing up in the labor force numbers. That’s not the case in the IE - we’ve seen significant employment *and* labor force growth.

The household survey seems to paint a more positive picture than the establishment survey discussed last week, but that’s because the two surveys are not based on the same information. The household survey includes agricultural workers, as well as a few other subsets of workers, which the establishment survey doesn’t count. Still, this is a good mid-summer report in a time when many others are skeptical about the future health of the economy.