Restaurant and hotel jobs, the hardest hit during the pandemic, are among those returning fastest to the North Bay as COVID-19 restrictions ease, a local economist said Wednesday.
But for other sectors, like government and brick-and-mortar retail, it remains unclear when — and how — those jobs may return.
Robert Eyler, Ph.D., dean of the School of Extended and International Education and a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, also said the North Bay has now recovered 94.7% of the jobs lost since January 2020.
“And a lot of economists are revising predictions from even just the previous quarter (because) the speed of recovery is gaining momentum,” he said. “And that’s good.”
Eyler presented his views during a virtual webinar held by Nelson Staffing, titled “Today’s Economy and the Remote Work Revolution: Expert Insight to Help Your Business Thrive in 2021.”
The pandemic’s impact on brick-and-mortar shops could be lasting, he noted.
“From a retail standpoint, we’ve seen our lives move from kind of a hybrid situation where we’re doing some shopping online, but a lot of it was still local,” Eyler said, “to now seeing large online retailers taking advantage of the current conditions in such a way to gather more market share because we have moved our lives online.”
On the other end of that online retail surge is a boost in jobs for the transportation and warehousing sector, he noted.
And economists are watching government jobs as the pandemic recovery continues.
“The COVID-19 recession triggered some retirements,” he said. “And as government budgets shrink — even though now we’re going to see a lot of federal money come in and help a lot of city, state and local governments over the next couple of years — one question is whether or not the budget contraction gave government a sense of, ‘Maybe we don’t need to rehire in completely the same capacity we started with before COVID-19.’”
Eyler also addressed jobs-recovery comparisons between the current recession and past economic turndowns.
“One thing I try to tell people is, don’t run to the recession after the first World War simply because the Spanish flu was there at the same time, and don’t run to the Great Depression because the numbers were relatively similar in terms of job loss,” he said. “You should really look at the Great Recession (that started in late 2007) because the global integration in terms of supply chains, labor markets and financial markets are more similar.”
Bruce Sarchet, a Sacramento-based employment and labor law attorney at Littler Mendelson, addressed the potential legal pitfalls employers could run into when it comes to their remote workforce.
He said with 80% of people working from home and two-thirds of those workers wanting to continue working remotely, according to Gallup polling, a big concern…
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