New York's Easing of Covid Restrictions Sees Small Job Boom

New York's Easing of Covid Restrictions Sees Small Job Boom

New York was the epicenter of the planet for the 2020 Covid-19 virus pandemic. Although experts will state that the virus got its start in China, and the first American case was found out west in Washington State, the fact is that New York is where things really took off. Over a million were infected and near 200,000 have died over the course of a year. At the height of the pandemic, New York had half of America's cases. So, government in New York did what they thought was correct, and they shut down the economy. Millions of jobs were lost, tens of thousands of businesses failed. Though now that they're loosening those restrictions in New York, jobs are starting to come back.

According to a recent jobs report, New York, and the entire tri-state area, is experiencing a mini boom in employment. The tri-state area being Connecticut, New York and New Jersey; all three areas are looking at good numbers. As of March, New York alone added over 61,000 jobs. Now, compared to the many millions of residents, this 0.8% increase doesn't seem like a lot. Though experts in the area claim that the important thing to look at is that this is a one-month figure from about a 30% loosening of restrictions.

In other words, experts are very happy and predict that the entire state will bounce back once this virus pandemic is behind us. If only roughly a third of restrictions loosened has this sort of impact over a one-month period, many claim that doing away with all restrictions will help the state experience exponential job growth in only a few short months.

The biggest issue New York was facing in the context of a jobs market was that 8.9% of its workforce was unemployed, which was way higher than the 3.9% national average. New York is steadily climbing back, however.

A big part of the reason that New York is once again climbing, threatening a surge, is that they've allowed many of their restaurants and vendors to get back to work. While people from outside the area might not think so, those thousands of street vendors actually account for many millions of dollars in commerce every year. Tens of millions of people visit New York simply to sample the ethnic food that's sold in the streets. This entire industry evaporated with Covid last year, though it is now making a comeback.

Between only February and April of last year, New York lost over 1.8 million jobs. Thankfully, about half of those jobs have returned. Though at over 900,000 jobs coming back, many were short-lived jobs that were granted to public-sector workers due to the CARES Act and other stimulus spending. So, what New York desperately needed was an injection of private industry to help return the state to its former economic status.

While it is currently far too early to tell if New York will keep trending up on the jobs chart, the one thing that is clear is the fact that New York loosening restrictions is putting many different people and industries back to work. Which for New Yorkers is a lot better than only the big box corporations being allowed to operate.

The Sad State of the Corporate Economy

No matter where one stands on the political spectrum, practically every normal, hard-working citizen can agree wholeheartedly that smaller mom 'n' pop businesses are better for society than huge corporations. Jeff Bezos and other multi-billionaires doubling their massive fortunes in the 2020 pandemic year is a very frightening picture of a future where government can quite literally shut down competitor businesses just to claim large corporations are essential.

Now, of course, we're not going the route of saying that there was any sort of conspiracy or even quid-pro-quo involved in government shutting down around 80% of all businesses in the USA, except for every single corporation which was named essential. Most of that had to do with the fact that large corporations also have online businesses and very large buildings where social distancing was achievable. That aside, however, most people are quite happy that places like New York are bringing back smaller businesses.

New York City is an economic vessel driven by its thousands of different restaurants and bodegas and other small business ventures. People were miserable there, and the state in total lost over a million residents and billions of dollars in commerce due to lock-downs. It's a good thing that more and more states are loosening their restrictions so that a normally functioning economy can once again grow.