Retailers swung the ax last month, representing all four of the top major job-cut announcements tallied by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Retail’s sea change from brick-and-mortar stores employing hundreds of people on sales floors to nimbler online sellers is just one example of the rapidly shifting employment landscape nationwide and in New York.
The city’s unemployment rate has fallen to 5.2 percent from a high of 10.2 percent in October 2009 and November 2009, during the Great Recession.
Big growth in the past decade has come in the fields of health care and social assistance, science and technology, education and leisure/hospitality.
The FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate) — a traditionally higher-paying stalwart of the local economy — faltered, as did the manufacturing sector.
Though the city’s overall employment picture has improved dramatically in the past decade, low-wage jobs have grown at more than five times the rate of the rest of the local economy, said Moody’s Analytics. Tourism jobs, for example, were a key driver of the recovery, but pay far less than the Wall Street jobs that were lost, noted Adam Kamins, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Looking ahead, experts expect more pain for the city’s retail sector, which is getting hammered both by Amazon and high rents, and a continued exodus of low-wage finance jobs.
The Trump administration’s plan to roll back the Dodd-Frank regulations, which were created after the last financial crisis, is expected to boost banks’ profits, perhaps spurring some hiring on the trading side, while causing the loss of many compliance positions in New York.
Tech and health care are expected to continue creating higher-wage jobs. Zocdoc, the online medical appointment-scheduling service, launched 10 years ago with three staffers. It now employs about 400 people at its Soho headquarters. Zocdoc currently has 48 open positions, including 15 spots for engineers, for a range of skills and salaries.
“The growth of tech … is at least injecting some high-wage jobs into the picture,” Kamins said.
The city is banking on science, including a new $500 million life sciences initiative announced last December, to create more good-paying middle-class jobs.
The de Blasio administration is also trying to foster small manufacturing, both for technology firms such as Queens-based BotFactory, and in the fast-growing specialty food sector. Masaki Momose, founder of Japanese salad-dressing brand MOMO, has hired three employees since leasing affordable commercial space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal last spring.
While traditional retailers struggle, one online seller based in Brooklyn is adding jobs. UncommonGoods, which sells home décor and gift items, employs 170 people year round and four or five times that number during the holidays — paying $14 an hour as a starting wage. The company often turns to job training and readiness programs, including one run by Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corp., to find qualified employees like Fabian Garcia of Staten Island. He started part-time in 2013 after a referral from Goodwill Industries, and is now an associate supervisor earning $40,000 a year.
“Don’t think there’s not a good job out there for you,” Garcia told The Post.
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