Speaker 1: (00:00)
Even in the face of the Omicron surge, the San Diego county unemployment rate continues to decrease San Diego end of the year with a 4.2% unemployment rate. That's the lowest rate since the pandemic, but not all industries are equal in the amount of job growth, high end tech and life sciences employment is booming while jobs in the real estate industry are down. Joining me is San Diego union Tribune business reporter Philip Moar Phil. Welcome back to the show. Yeah.
Speaker 2: (00:29)
Great to be here, Maureen.
Speaker 1: (00:30)
Thank you. Can you give us an idea of how a 4.2 unemployment rate in December stacks up against what the rates have been through the pandemic? Yeah, so
Speaker 2: (00:40)
That is very low compared to what we've seen throughout the pandemic. It hit a high of 15.9% in April, 2020, but it took a really long time to basically get back down to where we are now, before the pandemic in the months leading up to it, it was crazy. Unemployment rate was lower than 3%. So 4.2%, you know, if there was no pandemic and you just looked at it, you'd say, oh man, things are up kind of high. But compared to where it's been the last two years, roughly this is pretty good news for business analysts and economic analysts for San Diego county.
Speaker 1: (01:14)
And with that 4.2 unemployment rate, are we doing better or the same as most of California and the country
Speaker 2: (01:21)
Actually, we're doing better than the California average of 5%. So that's pretty good. But the national average is 3.7% a little bit lower than what we're at right now. You know, it's kind of funny earlier in the pandemic, especially when things started opening up, everyone kind of said, California's gonna take longer to recover because we had much stricter lockdown in order to stop the spread of COVID 19. However, I'm hearing different things now. No, one's really quite sure why California's taking a little bit while to recover compared to the rest of the nation. I mean, the prevailing wisdom does seem to be that the lockdown measures were part of the factor. So we'll have to wait and see
Speaker 1: (02:00)
What industries in San Diego are doing the most hiring.
Speaker 2: (02:03)
This one was a little shocking, especially for December where it's not usually a big hiring month, but the high paying professional and business services sector is the one hiring the most right now, which is kind of fascinating cuz it's our highest paying jobs in scientific research in technology, biotech architecture. So they that's where we saw the biggest jump, which was pretty good. If you're an economic analyst, do we
Speaker 1: (02:28)
Know why that would be
Speaker 2: (02:29)
Throughout the pandemic? There's been tons of money pouring into venture capital. We saw San Diego startups in 2021 get $9.6 billion for a variety of companies in life science tech. So a lot of those industries, investors just poured a lot of money into them, especially, you know, biotech here in San Diego, lots of research, shrouding pandemic and all this kind of stuff. So they're kind of flush with cash at the moment. So that sort of translates into hiring. And that's what we really saw about 4,100 jobs were added in December in professional and business services. So those jobs can pay a lot of money.
Speaker 1: (03:08)
Yeah. A lot of money. You have a list of them in your article and we're talking six figures, aren't
Speaker 2: (03:13)
We? Yeah. You know, the funny thing is through the bureau of labor statistics, I only have 2020 no numbers right now, but you can imagine that they've gone up. For instance, if you're, you know, like a computer and information systems manager, the entry level in 2020 was about $99,000 a year. But if you're some physical scientists that might work in some sort of biotech field, your annual salaries could be around 120,000 and starting wage back then was around 82,000. I really suspect that it's, it's getting up for entry level in that position, probably nearing a hundred thousand. And of course there's a lot of other things like if you're a super high paid biotech person say you're a natural science manager, they were making in twenty twenty, a hundred eighty 3000 a year. So pretty significant wages in those, those air.
Speaker 1: (04:00)
Now on the flip side, a number of sectors actually lost jobs in December, is that because of the surge and the virus,
Speaker 2: (04:08)
You know, the weird thing about that is it probably was affected in some way, but some of them, I wouldn't have expected such as like retail, leisure hospitality. A lot of times they have a big jump in hiring around December. So I'm not quite sure exactly the, the exact reason why we saw a dip in those industries. I know a lot of them are struggling, especially construction define workers. So that could be part of the factor too. But there, there just seems to be a lot of things going on with, you know, supply chain waiting for goods to come in. So they could actually work on stuff. And, you know, tourism is still suffering. There was a ton of things canceled because of the latest surge. So that's another factor as
Speaker 1: (04:50)
Well. Overall though, on an annual basis, tourism in San Diego did quite a lot of hiring. I mean it rebounded pretty well. Can you remind us what kind of jobs the tourism industry includes?
Speaker 2: (05:02)
Anything from like casinos to working at a hotel and sort of in the leisure and hospitality sector, we kind of roll it all into one with restaurants. So it's all that type of work right there that sort of runs into it. And of course that includes bars as well, bartenders, that sort of thing. So if we look at a year over year basis in December, the leisure and hospital, they added about 37,600 workers. So if you looked at just year over year, you'd be like, wow, they did great, you know, but, um, they're still recovering from the pandemic
Speaker 1: (05:32)
And although home prices are incredibly high as, as you've been reporting through the year, a lot of real estate related jobs seem to be suffering. Yeah. I
Speaker 2: (05:41)
Was surprised by that. I saw a dip in financial services hiring and I was thinking to myself, okay, well there seems to be a lot of work in finances, but then I kind of forgot that real estate is included under that, that category. That includes a ton of realtors. And the interesting thing that's going on in that industry right now is you have these record breaking sales, big profits. But the biggest thing is we have very, very few S for sale. At one point in December, a weekly estimate was about 1700 homes for sale in a county of more than 3 million people. So one way to look at that is real estate agents don't have as much to do. Another thing is there's a lot of jobs tied to real estate, such as mortgage loan, originators, all sorts of stuff like that. If there aren't a lot of homes for sale that gives a lot of people, a lot of free time who don't have anything to do, you know? So that are tied to that industry.
Speaker 1: (06:33)
Does having an employment boom in jobs that pay 100,000 to dollars or more, does that help our overall economy in San Diego?
Speaker 2: (06:42)
I talked to Ellen Jen over at the university of San Diego. And he says, yes, because if you have those people that have those high paying jobs, they are putting money back into the economy. They're going to that restaurant and you work at with poor wages and they're paying for it, or so say they're subscribing to your newspaper for your lower paid report, something like that. You know? So they're putting money into the community and it might be a tough pill to swallow if you're in the construction industry and seeing someone's making like triple what you're making, but you know, it's not like they're like just independently wealthy people just moving to San Diego to round on the coast or something. They are part of the economy they're out there every day. They're maybe getting lunch on their lunch breaks. If they're working back in the office, all those kind of things sort of filter out through the economy.
Speaker 1: (07:28)
Okay. Then I've been speaking with San Diego union Tribune, business reporter, Philip Moar and Philip. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: (07:35)
All right. Thank you so much.
