As Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators spend the next few weeks fashioning a state budget that’s plagued by a multibillion-dollar deficit, they can’t count on a booming economy to make their task easier. California’s recovery from the devastating economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been sluggish at best, trailing what’s happening in the nation as a whole and in the state’s arch-rivals, such as Texas and Florida.
According to Employment Development Department data , there are 200,000 fewer Californians in the labor force — those employed or seeking employment — than there were in February 2020, just before the pandemic exploded. There are 500,000 fewer employed and 200,000 more unemployed. While California’s unemployment rate of 5.
3% in March was just a third of what it was at the height of the pandemic-induced recession, it was still the highest of any state , markedly higher than the national rate of 3.9% and nearly two percentage points higher than it was before the pandemic. By the federal government’s more nuanced measure of employment called U-6 , which counts not only the unemployed, but workers who are “marginally attached” to the labor force and those who are involuntarily working part time, the state’s 9.
5% rate of underemployment is also the nation’s highest. Those numbers imply an economy that’s not even operating at cruising speed, much less accelerating. Even the state’s technology sector, centered in the San Francisco .
