With strong hiring in July, Dallas-Plano-Irving inches closer to a full jobs recovery

Dallas-Plano-Irving continues to lead the way in job restoration.

Last month, this Metro division added 18,500 jobs, well above the pace in the pre-pandemic go-go days and on par with recent results. In the past three months, Dallas-Plano-Irving has created nearly 59,000 jobs, accounting for nearly a third of the total increase in jobs in Texas during the period.

That’s nearly three times the number of jobs created in Houston and Austin in the three months. North Texas’ other metro division, Fort Worth-Arlington, has only created 1,800 jobs over time.

While some sectors, such as housing, are well below pre-pandemic job levels, others in Dallas-Plano-Irving are in full expansion mode. They restored jobs lost in the early months of the pandemic and grew back despite the public health crisis.

That puts the Dallas economy in a strong position at a time when hospital admissions to COVID-19 are on the rise and the recovery threatens to slow again.

“We’re already moving towards something more normal,” said Jay Denton, chief analyst at ThinkWhy, a Dallas software services company that tracks employment trends. “Even if the delta variant slows us down, we have already regained almost all of the lost jobs and certain industries are fully back.

“Other markets still have some big holes to dig out,” he said.

In July, Dallas-Plano-Irving had 2,725,000 non-agricultural employees, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s 34,000 fewer than in February 2020, before the pandemic. The gap between now and then is minus 1.24%.

That’s better than the US as a whole, where total non-farm jobs were 3.7% below pre-pandemic levels in July.

Phoenix and Austin have reclaimed more jobs than Dallas-Plano-Irving. But the gap for Fort Worth-Arlington was 3.4% in July. Houston’s gap stayed above 5%, and New York, Los Angeles and Chicago were even worse.

The most vulnerable subways like Orlando and Las Vegas are heavily reliant on business travel and tourism, Denton said. In July, both regions were more than 9% below their pre-pandemic employment levels.

With COVID cases on the rise, it may be natural for businesses and families to postpone travel. This could result in the cancellation of special events and delaying the return of workers to the office, which would likely slow the recovery of hotels and restaurants.

If events are canceled, employers may have to cut staff or working hours. Those hits are likely to focus on sectors that are already suffering, including hotels.

But they are unlikely to decrease the demand for labor in other areas, including technology, finance, and professional services – industries that represent Dallas’s strengths.

“Hiring managers can slow the pace or even pause the pace, but they have trouble keeping up with the open positions they currently have,” said Denton. “Even if their hiring budget is cut in half, they still have jobs to fill.”

Professional, scientific, and technical services, which include computer systems design, lawyers, and accountants, had 13,000 more employees last month than in February 2020. That’s an increase of over 5% in Dallas-Plano-Irving.

Employment in commerce, transportation and utilities rose 4.1%, creating nearly 22,000 jobs in Dallas since the pandemic. Financial activities added 8,800 employees, an increase of 3.4%.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, business and finance, along with information technology and telecommunications, dominate the Dallas job market. These sectors account for a much larger proportion of the workforce than the national average.

“Dallas serves as the state’s business and financial services hub and has become a major high-tech hub,” wrote the Dallas Fed in a 2016 report on industrial clusters in Texas metro.

Technology, business services, and financial activities companies have weathered the pandemic economy and often achieved stronger results. Many employees, unlike those in the service industry, have worked face-to-face from home.

In July, lodging jobs in Dallas-Plano-Irving were still 26.6% below pre-pandemic levels, by far the worst, according to ThinkWhy and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The arts and entertainment, job placement and administrative support jobs also fell well short of February 2020.

Even in the same industry, the recovery has been uneven. Dallas-Plano-Irving outpatient health care jobs were 2.8% higher in July than before the pandemic. The number of jobs in hospitals in the Dallas area fell nearly 2% over the same period, the data shows.

Retail jobs in July were 1% higher than before the pandemic. This includes strong employment growth in building materials and garden centers – and a sharp decline in the number of employees in department stores.

“This recovery has varied across the same industries,” said Denton.

This creates further recruitment challenges, and he cited health workers as an example. The health sector, which also includes doctors and nurses, had an unemployment rate of 1.8% in July. The unemployment rate for health care jobs was 6.4%.

For much of the year, ThinkWhy ranked Dallas-Plano-Irving as the best job market in the country. Denton believes it is still on target to exceed total employment before the pandemic in 2022, even as the Delta variant worsens.

“That’s pretty impressive considering how things have changed in the last year and a half,” he said.

He is particularly confident of companies that have recovered early: “They not only know how to deal with the pandemic; they know how to grow their income, ”said Denton.

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