While the unemployment rate in San Francisco is holding at a record low 2.1 percent, the number of people living in the city with job has actually dropped by 4,900 to 552,900 since the beginning of the year. And while the estimated change in employment last month was a negligible slip of 100, San Francisco was the only Bay Area County to record a slip and employment in the city typically ticks up in May, averaging a gain of around 1,000 over the past six years.

That being said, there are still 4,600 more people living in San Francisco with paychecks than there were at the same time last year and 116,200 more since the start of 2010.

In Alameda County, which includes the City of Oakland, the estimated number of people living in the county with a paycheck has dropped by 4,600 since the beginning of the year to 820,400 but did gain 1,300 in May and remains 5,600 higher on a year-over-year basis with a gain of 127,600 since January of 2010 and the unemployment rate has dropped to a record low 2.6 percent.

Across the greater East Bay, employment inched up by 2,200 last month to 1,364,900 while the unemployment rate held at 2.7 percent.

Up in Marin, the number of employed residents inched up by 700 to 137,000, which is even on a year-over-year basis while the unemployment rate has dropped to a record low 2.1 percent.

And down in the valley, employment in San Mateo County was unchanged in May but remains 3,900 higher on a year-over-year basis and the unemployment rate has dropped to a record low of 1.9 percent, while the number of employed residents in Santa Clara County inched up by 1,100 last month to 1,019,100, which is 19,800 more than at the same time last year and the unemployment rate dropped to a new record low of 2.3 percent.

14 thoughts on “Bay Area Employment Inches Up, but Not in San Francisco”
  1. The oil change on 19th and Noriega is offering signing bonuses (!) to its next 10 (!!) new hires. The only people in San Francisco without jobs right now are people who don’t want to work, or are unable to work.

    1. Same everywhere. Avocado pickers are making $300/day in many cases due to a shortage of labor. The post office is offering $17.50 (almost $35k annual) for assistant mail carrier, which needs no real experience, and is good money outside the Bay Area. If you are unemployed in this economy, you either live in a dead end place and should probably move, or you don’t really want to work.

  2. Or they’re over 50 and can’t even get an interview, given the rampant Bay Area age bias in hiring. They’ve just dropped out and aren’t counted.

    1. I’ve seen how this plays out in person in my previous job. Usually the hiring manager would just decide who they were going to interview on their own, but in this case I was on a committee that was reviewing the resumes.

      So in very limited applicant pool, the second-best application was from a guy who had just the right amount of technical expertise and management qualifications (job was a “lead” position). The manager says “Hmmm…how old do we think this guy is?” and then logged into linkedin from her laptop. The applicant had his picture on his profile page which showed he had established silver in around the temples and thinning on top (could have been in his late forties; certainly wasn’t sixty yet). That, and a more complete CV, which showed he left out a couple of jobs he’d had after college.

      The manager says “Looks like this guy’s a little too close to retirement age for this position”, and took his application out of the pool just like that.

      I looked at the same profile at home later that evening and he was an engineer who worked for years in southern california’s aerospace industry, got laid-off and went back to school to retrain at what had to be great personal expense.

      If it weren’t for linkedin, he would have gotten at least a first interview. You know all those tech triumphalists who were running around in 1998 saying “the Internet changes everything?”, well, many of the changes brought on weren’t exactly in a positive direction.

    2. Or they moved out of Bay Area due to improved job market everywhere else.

      Bay Area was very attractive during the great recession. As we are reaching full employment on a nationwide level, those benefits are being outweighed by high housing costs.

  3. The Russian Hill coffee shops are still full of millennial during the day just checking their emails and Facebook accounts. Are you going to tell me they are employed?

    1. When you work from home, many people don’t actually “work from home”. They work in coffee shops.

          1. True – I could do this part of my work from home or in a coffee shop just as well as here in the office

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