Local government hiring fueled San Diego County’s job growth last month and nudged the unemployment rate down to 4.4 percent in March, state labor officials reported Friday.
The county figure is below the state rate of 5.3 percent but higher than the U.S. average of 3.9 percent for the same period. It’s also down from the local February revised rate of 4.8 percent.
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“It is positive that (the unemployment rate) is down compared to the previous month, but there are some signs that there are some weaknesses in San Diego’s economy,” said Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego.
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Gin said his concerns derive from a decline in job growth among some of the region’s key sectors, such as manufacturing, and among high-paying jobs in professional, scientific and technical services.
He added that he’s a little worried about San Diego’s unemployment rate being greater than the national rate, because “when the economy is good, we’re typically below the national level.”
That said, several industries showed robust activity.
San Diego gained about 4,400 jobs in March, with most gains coming from government payrolls, which added about 2,000 jobs. Those monthly gains were followed by leisure and hospitality adding 1,500 jobs, and construction employment increasing by roughly 1,300 jobs.
The San Diego region was right behind Los Angeles in recording the most job demand, according to state data that aggregates job postings during the month of March. The health care sector led San Diego’s job postings last month — registered nurses were the top hiring occupation with more than 2,300 job postings.
Gin said the high demand for registered nurses is no surprise because it’s a hiring trend that predates the pandemic by more than a decade.
The top hiring employers in March were UC San Diego, Sharp Healthcare and Scripps Health.
Over the past year, San Diego has gained about 14,500 jobs, a 0.9 percent increase.
San Diego’s private education and health services sector, which includes nursing and social assistance, led year-over-year employment gains with 15,500 jobs. These industries have reported local job gains in 10 of the past 12 months.
Government jobs, mostly in local offices, added 6,200 jobs over the past year. Leisure and hospitality gained 5,300 jobs during the same period.
San Diego County’s labor force — adults who either have a job or are actively looking for one — was 1.6 million in March, a decline of less than 1 percent in a year. The labor force was unchanged between February and March.
At General Dynamics NASSCO on Friday, April 19 workers exit from the shipyard at the end of their work day, during shift change.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The largest annual job declines were in the professional and business services sector, which lost about 10,600 jobs since last March. This includes legal, scientific, waste management and architectural jobs — often San Diego’s higher-paying jobs in key segments like biotechnology.
Similarly, the biggest local job losses in March were in the professional and business services category, which lost about 1,200 jobs between February and March.
“Since 2022, San Diego has been defying national trends of growth in this industry cluster, driven by slow and steady declines in local scientific research and development services,” said Karen Boyd, economist and director of research at the San Diego Regional Policy & Innovation Center.
She said the decline in local scientific research and development services can be traced to layoffs in San Diego’s biotech and pharmaceutical sector, a major employment hub for the region. Many of San Diego’s high-tech companies have tried to “rightsize” after a boom in pandemic hiring and following a dropoff in venture capital investment.
“Although these layoffs have a negative impact on workers and the region, they probably reflect a wind down of COVID-driven growth, rather than a fundamental weakness in the industry,” Boyd said.
The local manufacturing sector also contracted by 3,100 jobs; financial activities (real estate, insurance, investments) declined 1,900 jobs; and the information segment (broadcasting, telecommunications, newspapers, publishing industry) lost about 1,000 jobs year over year.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for March was 4.6 percent, which was unchanged from February’s adjusted rate, said Daniel Enemark, chief economist at the San Diego Regional Policy & Innovation Center.
As for the slight decline in the non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, Enemark said that is typical in March. The San Diego region saw decreases in the March unemployment rate 78 percent of the time over the past decade, he said, excluding the outlier of 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic began.
State officials do not seasonally adjust jobless rates for individual counties. Compared with other parts of California, San Diego County landed in the middle, with its rate of 4.4 percent, as most counties also saw a month-over-month decline in unemployment.
The rate was 5.2 percent in Los Angeles County, 3.9 percent in Orange County, 3.7 percent in San Francisco County, 4.1 percent in Santa Clara County, 7.4 percent in Santa Cruz County and 5.2 percent in Riverside County.
