The Big Apple is doing better than the rest of the nation.
That’s because New York City’s employment picture, despite reports to the contrary, is booming, city officials say.
And the city’s economy has recovered all the jobs lost in the last recession, according to the latest numbers from the New York State Department of Labor.
“New York City is experiencing really strong job growth,” says Patrick Muncie, a spokesman for the city’s Economic Development Corp.
“In addition, New York City has rebounded from the recession faster than the rest of the country, recovering all the jobs lost, while the rest of the country has recovered only 40 percent,” he added.
Some 79,000 private-sector jobs were created in May in New York City, city and state officials said.
The rate of job creation in the five boroughs, he adds, is outpacing the rest of the nation.
“Our job growth in May was 2.4 percent, compared to 1.8 percent at the national level. That is significantly more,” he adds. New York state’s job-growth rate in the same month, 1.9 percent, also slightly outpaced the national numbers, according to the state Labor Department.
“The latest statistics show that New York’s private-sector employers continued to add jobs,” said Bohdan M. Wynnyk, deputy director of the state Labor Department’s Division of Research and Statistics.
But the bad news is the jobless numbers. The city’s unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent in May from 9.5 percent in April, while the state number was also up slightly to 8.6 percent.
What happened?
As job growth has increased, state and city officials said, so too, has the number of job seekers. Some of them, they said, had given up looking for work last year, but now believe that jobs can be found.
EDC’s Muncie said the city’s economy still needs more growth, and much remains to be done. “However, these numbers represent yet another positive sign of the continued economic recovery taking place across the five boroughs,” Muncie said.
In the state, the big job gains were in professional services, education and health services, leisure and hospitality, trade, transportation and utilities as well as financial services.