San Francisco’s unemployment rate rose, making it more difficult to find jobs. Some may be searching for work at job fairs, such as this San Francisco City Job Fair at the county fair building in 2023.
Danielle Echeverria/S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco’s unemployment rate rose to 4.1% in January as tech layoffs continued, in contrast to California and national job gains, according to state data released Friday.
The city’s unemployment rate was up from 3.8% in December. In contrast, California’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.4% in January from 5.5% in the prior month, with employers adding 93,500 non-farm jobs.
The tech industry showed continued weakness in January, with the San Francisco metropolitan area’s information sector shedding 1,800 jobs. The area includes San Mateo County.
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California’s information sector also lost 1,400 jobs in January, while private education and health care continued to lead the state in job growth, with 31,800 positions added.
Numerous tech companies have cut jobs in the Bay Area this year, including Meta, Oracle and Atlassian. Artificial intelligence companies have yet to add enough jobs to offset those cuts, despite startups attracting billions of dollars in funding and leasing massive new offices.
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“It remains very, very difficult to find any decently paid white collar job in the Bay Area,” said Michael Bernick, special counsel at Duane Morris LP and former head of the California Employment Development Department.
Other parts of the Bay Area also saw unemployment rates jump: Santa Clara County’s rate rose to 4.2%, Alameda County’s rate was up to 4.6% and Contra Costa County’s rate jumped to 4.8%.
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Separately, nationwide job figures showed 178,000 jobs added in March, according to the Labor Department, beating analyst expectations. Those gains included 91,000 jobs in education and health care, including 31,000 Kaiser Permanente workers who ended a strike last month in California and Hawaii.
“There were a lot of predictions out there that the job market would collapse,” in the wake of tariffs and declining consumer sentiment, Bernick said. “It slowed down but it didn’t collapse.”
But California’s share of job growth has been weakening, and its unemployment rate of 5.4% in January was the highest in the country, Bernick noted. Nevada was at 5.3% and New Jersey and Oregon were at 5.2% unemployment rate.
The San Francisco metropolitan area lost 12,200 jobs between December and January. But some losses, such as in retail, were seasonal and attributed to the holiday shopping season ending. The data isn’t seasonally adjusted.
Bernick said that the January job figure is three months old, so a clearer picture of the local job market should come when the state releases February data in two weeks.
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But his sense is that it’s getting more and more difficult to land a position in the Bay Area.
“The picture there is of a very competitive, difficult, brutal even white collar market,” he said. When talking to job seekers who are struggling to land even interviews, he tells them: “It’s not you, it’s the job market.”