New York City lost about 750,000 payroll and independent contractor jobs in 2020 during the pandemic. That's one out of every six jobs. But while the COVID-19 vaccine has fueled hopes of a recovery this year, a new report says the city's economy will not snap back easily.
The report comes from James Parrott of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. He spoke with WNYC Senior Reporter Beth Fertig and we excerpted sections for Gothamist (the interview has been edited for clarity).
Q: I want to start with the impact of all those jobs we lost last year, 750,000 is more than what was reported earlier, right? How come?
A: If you look between February and December, the net change in payroll employment was around 510,000 in New York City. The 750,000 represents the average of each month's employment level, and it includes independent contractors, all taxi cab, Uber and Lyft drivers are independent contractors.
Q: Which jobs did we lose the most in New York City?
A: So the industry with by far the greatest number of lost jobs is the restaurant industry. The arts and entertainment recreation sector has proportionally been hit the hardest. And both of these sectors and in other sectors like hotels and retailing, what I call the face to face service industry category, job losses have been about twice proportionately in New York City, as at the national level.
Q: Which communities are hit hardest by those job losses? Because you looked at the demographics right?
A: We can only estimate. But in trying to estimate that, you know, our sense is that very heavy concentration among workers of color, you know, about 70 percent of all job losses, young workers got hit very hard. And in both of these cases, it's because the industries that got hit hardest, the face-to-face service industries, restaurants, retail, have very high concentrations of persons of color and industries like restaurants and clothing retailing, have a lot of young people.
Q: So when we talk about recovery, everybody uses this phrase K-shaped recovery. Who is on the line on that letter K that's pointing up? Which industries are you talking about?
A: So in the report we refer to these as the remote working industries. So it's industries like finance, professional services, law firms, accounting firms, consulting firms. A lot of the tech industry is in professional services. It's also information media, movie production and television production. And then a lot of the real estate industry is part of that also. So these are generally much higher paid industries. For the most part, their workers have been able to work remotely during the pandemic. So that upward part of the K has done very well.
And meanwhile, the people losing the jobs are on the downward part of the K. So it's you know, it's a good chunk of people in the lower half of the income spectrum, the people who work in restaurants and retail, people in the arts sector, in nail salons and barbershops, even for some who have gone back to work because there are industries and businesses that haven't fully recovered. Many are only working on a part-time basis.
Q: Let's say most New Yorkers get vaccinated by September and you predict thousands of people will move back to the city as a result. Why do you say jobs and businesses still won't snap back this year?
A: Clearly, when vaccinations are widespread and business restrictions are lifted, there's going to be an expectation that people will still wear face masks for some period of time until the infection rate really gets driven down. So that, you know, it means that retail employment is not going to bounce back to where it was before. And tourism is a big part of the New York City economy. It supports, affects between 300,000 and 500,000 thousand jobs. No one expects the tourism sector to be fully rebounded for three or four years.
Q: What would need to happen for there to be a faster recovery?
A: President Biden has a very ambitious recovery plan that will further extend unemployment benefits and so on. So that will certainly help. But it's not necessarily going to rebuild or reconstruct the jobs or replace the jobs that we lost. What that will take, I think, is a significant physical infrastructure investment plan and in a corresponding social infrastructure investment. And so we need a combination of service jobs and construction jobs to provide the level of employment demand that it's going to take to get us back to the level that we were at a year ago.
Beth Fertig is a senior reporter at WNYC covering the city’s recovery. You can follow her on Twitter at @bethfertig. This report was filed for the Race & Justice Unit at Gothamist/WNYC.
