Have Fresno County jobs bounced back since COVID-19 began? Here’s what the numbers show
Fresno County and the rest of the central San Joaquin Valley finished 2021 with December monthly unemployment rates that were at or near their lowest points of the entire year – even as the region’s economy slogged through a second year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the annual average unemployment rates have yet to recover to the pre-pandemic levels of 2019 – evidence of the grip that the coronavirus and its highly contagious omicron variant continue to have on jobs in the region and the state.
Figures released last week by the California Employment Development Department showed that the official unemployment rate in Fresno County in December was 7.0%, unchanged from November. That’s more than three percentage points better than the start of the year, when the county’s jobless rate was estimated at 10.1% in both January and February.
For the entire year, the average unemployment rate in Fresno County was 8.8%, on the strength of significant gains in the number of people with jobs over the course of the year and a corresponding decrease in those who were without work. In December, the EDD estimated that about 416,500 were working – although the figures do not specify whether they had full-time or part-time jobs.
That was up from fewer than 401,000 employed a year earlier, in December 2020. Between December 2020 and December 2021, the number of unemployed dipped by more than 13,000, to 31,300, according to the EDD estimates.
The largest year-over-year percentage gains in jobs of any major employment sector throughout the year in Fresno County was in the leisure and hospitality industry – businesses that were pummeled in 2020 by on-again, off-again closure orders and limitations on bars, restaurants, lodging and travel.
The sector as a whole saw a 19% improvement in employment in Fresno County, growing from about 27,300 positions in December 2020 to 32,500 by December 2021.
Despite Fresno County’s improvement in the annual unemployment rate from 11.3% in 2020 to 8.8% in 2021, the rate remains above the 7.4% reported for 2019, before COVID-19 began wreaking havoc on businesses, jobs and lives. The 2019 pre-pandemic unemployment rate was the lowest it had been in the county since 1990.
Similar patterns were seen in neighboring Valley counties:
- Kings County: 9.2% annual average monthly unemployment in 2021, down from 11.6% in 2020, but above the pre-pandemic rate of 8.0% in 2018.
- Madera County: 8.4% in 2021, down from 10.8% in 2020, but above the pre-pandemic rate of 7.0% in 2019.
- Merced County: 9.8% in 2021, down from 12.2% in 2020, but above the pre-pandemic rate of 8.2% in 2019.
- Tulare County: 10.3% in 2021, down from 13.3% in 2020, but above the pre-pandemic rate of 9.9% in 2019.
Valley counties continued to show a pattern of higher unemployment than statewide averages. California’s average monthly unemployment rate in 2021 was 7.3%, lower than any Valley county, and lower than the 10.5% reported for 2020.
Yet the statewide rate remains several percentage points above the three-decade low of 4.2% registered in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic struck.
This story was originally published January 26, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
