Since then, the industry has lost jobs in New York City and in New Jersey. This recent job loss has been particularly significant in the city’s securities industry, which has shed nearly 4,000 jobs since April. More difficulties may lie ahead, as there have been many recent announcements of consolidations and layoffs in the region’s banking sector. Despite weak labor market conditions overall, some sectors are enjoying robust growth in the region. In particular, the professional and business services and education and health sectors have continued to add jobs. These are high-value-added services that the region can export to other parts of the country and overseas, and provide jobs that tend to be performed by highly skilled people. As such, these sectors help support the broader economy and are likely to provide a source of growth for the region going forward. It is difficult to say when the pace of job growth will pick up. As such, we will continue to monitor our region’s economy and job situation closely. Job creation in the region The fact that the recovery has been so sluggish might lead you to believe that no jobs are being created. However, this is not true. Beneath the high unemployment rate and overall slow job growth lies a considerable amount of job churning. Ongoing losses in some sectors are being offset by gains in other sectors. Today we look inside this churning for clues about how these changes are playing out in our region.
How do these changes in the labor market occur in the midst of a recession and recovery? First, many jobs are destroyed rapidly and few created as the economy weakens. This pattern is a defining characteristic of recessions. Afterward, during the recovery, employment rises as layoffs subside and firms begin to hire more. As this process plays out, some hiring will be in different industries from the layoffs. For example, some auto manufacturing jobs may never come back, while health care providers continue to add jobs. Thus, employers are adding two sorts of jobs: new and old. Some jobs are in industries that continued to expand jobs throughout the recession and weak recovery, such as health care and education. We think of these as “new jobs.” These shifts in jobs are transformational. They are part of how our region adjusts to the evolution of technology, trade patterns and consumer preferences. In addition, now that we are in recovery, a broad set of industries are beginning to add jobs to replace earlier layoffs, such as administrative support and wholesale  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  and retail trade. We think of these as “old jobs” because they restore their industries’ share of jobs as economic activity picks up. The two recessions before the current one saw an unusually high share of “new job” creation – in expanding industries, rather than rebounds of “old jobs” – compared with recessions in the 1970s and 1980s.