Long Island recovers jobs lost to the pandemic but at a slower rate than the nation, north Jersey

Employment in Nassau and Suffolk counties was up 0.4% in March compared with February 2020, before the coronavirus struck, the data shows.

Employment in New York City was up 0.3% in the same period.

However, both the city and the Island lagged the job growth of the nation, which was 3.8%, and northern New Jersey, which ranged from 2.2% to 4.7%, based on the data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the research firm Moody’s Economy.com.

Joelle Scally, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said the differences are due to the strengths and weaknesses of economic sectors in each area. For example, health care is a big employer on Long Island and that sector bounced back from the COVID-induced recession of 2020, she said.

“There has been a strong recovery in that sector over the last year,” Scally said during a briefing for journalists on Tuesday when the bank released its analysis of employment data for 2020-24.

“Almost 1 in 5 Long Islanders are employed in the health care sector. … And I think the strong growth in that sector” helped overall employment, she said in response to a Newsday question.

The jobs recovery in Nassau and Suffolk also benefited from a new pool of employees: people who moved out of New York City and other densely populated places where the coronavirus spread rapidly, according to Jaison R. Abel, head of the New York Fed’s urban and regional studies department.

“The availability of workers is a key factor to growth,” he said. “Long Island has actually done a little bit better job than other parts of the region … in being able to attract workers, whether that’s people who left New York City or just attracting people from other parts of the country.”

Abel said northern New Jersey benefited from an influx of working-age people as well.

In the Garden State, the jobs recovery has been strongest in Middlesex, Monmouth and Ocean counties, where employment was up 4.7% in March compared with pre-pandemic times. Newark was up 3.4% in the period and Bergen, Hudson and Passaic counties rose 2.2%, according to the data analysis.

North of New York City, in Orange, Rockland and Westchester counties, the number of jobs is still 0.3% below pre-pandemic levels. The same holds true for most of upstate, the data shows.

Abel said employment in New York State’s 10 regions has returned to 2019-early 2020 growth rates.

“We’ve shifted out of this recovery phase and resumed kind of normal growth patterns,” he said. “People have changed their behavior to some extent back to the pre-pandemic way and businesses look like they did before.”

Nationwide, the Villages community in Florida, which has attracted thousands of senior citizens from New York State and elsewhere, had the most employment growth between February 2020 and March, up 23.8%. No. 2 was St. George, Utah, up 19.6%, and Austin, Texas, 17.9%.