The Center for Jobs and the Economy has released our initial analysis of the June Employment Report from the California Employment Development Department. For additional information and data about the California economy visit www.centerforjobs.org/ca.

The June data in general shows a continued but slower rise in jobs while employment growth slowed even further.  In the seasonally adjusted data, employment gains—the number of workers returning to jobs—have averaged only 27,300 over the past four months.  While jobs continue to reopen and—for those higher wage industries not as affected by the state’s restrictions—to expand, the recovery has yet to reach a substantial number of the workers sidelined by the state’s pandemic-period restrictions.

California recovery continues to lag the rest of the states, with the largest gap still being in the number of recovered nonfarm jobs.

By use of a simple metric, California can be said to be leading the US recovery.  Since January using the seasonally adjusted data, job growth in the state accounted for 18.5% of the national total, or well above its 11.6% of total jobs in pre-pandemic February 2020.

This metric, however, is profoundly misleading on a number of counts.  First, California may be leading now in the growth of jobs, but it also previously led the nation in closing jobs through the depth, length, and continued uncertainty surrounding the restrictions it imposed throughout the pandemic.  Job losses were much deeper at the beginning of the pandemic.  California also made the policy choice to make the damage even more severe by actually accelerating enforcement of AB 5 (2019), eliminating self-employment options for many workers even during the sharpest economic downturn on record and contributing to the even sharper drops in employment compared to the other states.  Having more jobs recover is simply the expected outcome of now allowing more of them to reopen.  Except in the few instances where industries are above their February 2020 levels, California is not necessarily creating new jobs; it is reopening and recovering from its far deeper losses.

Second, counting from January incorporates a substantial element of double-counting.  California as with the rest of nation was showing growing recovery towards the end of last year.  This progress was brought to a halt and reversed through another round of state-ordered closures.  Again using the seasonally adjusted numbers, nonfarm jobs reached a pandemic peak last November, but then fell 155,400 to a new near-term low in January.  Taking that low point, nonfarm jobs have grown 558,700 since January—403,300 coming mostly from additional recovery while the other 155,400 have been recovered twice.