Unemployment rate for young NYC workers is in double digits, report says

Nearly twice as many young workers — over 70,000 — are unemployed in New York City compared to 2019, the year before the coronavirus pandemic swept the world, according to a report from the office of State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

Hardest hit are young men, the report says, concluding that “male workers have driven the high young worker unemployment rate," as traditional service industries remain impacted by the recovery from the pandemic and other factors.

The city unemployment rate is in double digits for 16- to 24-year-olds overall, nearly 18%, compared with about 9% in the rest of the state and 8% in the United States overall. By comparison, overall unemployment is 5.6% in the city and 3.4% nationwide.

In New York City, it's nearly 24% for young men.

“While the rest of New York State and the nation have seen strong rebounds in their youth workforces, with fewer people unemployed now than in 2019, as of October 2022, the City’s young workers have not yet recovered from the pandemic,” according to the report, issued this month: “New York City’s Uneven Recovery: Youth Labor Force Struggling.”

That’s not to say that the unemployment rate hasn’t improved: during some of the worst of the pandemic, the unemployment rate for younger workers was 22% (15.9% nationwide). It’s just lagging the recovery elsewhere.

Mitchell Moss, a New York University professor of urban policy and planning, said the pandemic is only one factor in a more complicated picture.

“The city’s retail sector has always been an entry-level career path for young people, and as anyone who has walked on the retail corridors of Manhattan knows, shopping in stores has declined,” Moss said. “That’s not due to the pandemic alone but to the rise of online shopping. So we have lost a vast portion of the entry-level career paths.”

Plus there’s what’s happened with restaurants, hotels and bars, other traditional employers for entry-level jobs, “and we have yet to fully recover over the past two years to pre-pandemic levels” there, Moss added.

The report made similar observations: "Some of these workers left low-paying jobs. Due to limited experience, young workers tend to have fewer job options and, as a result, are more prone to work in industries with lower skill requirements. Leisure and hospitality and retail trade are two such service industries that were also hit hard by the pandemic."

The unemployment rate is worse for nonwhite younger workers than for white workers in the same age group, a disparity that is more pronounced than elsewhere in the country, where rates have nearly recovered to pre-pandemic levels, according to the report. In the city, it’s 16.2% for whites, but 18.5% for Blacks, 23.3% for Hispanics and 23.3% for Asians.

The unemployment number for young men in the city, nearly 24%, is "higher in the city than in the nation because a greater share worked in the leisure and hospitality sector, which is one of the city’s hardest hit industries," according to a news release from the state comptroller's office.

The rate was 11.8% pre-pandemic. It's 13.3% for females in the 16-24 demographic; it was 8.2% pre-pandemic.

The report notes that "there are currently over 70,000 unemployed young workers in New York City, nearly two times as many as in 2019."

And it warns: “there may not be enough openings in the sector to meet current demands.”

In 2021, the most recent data available for Long Island, the unemployment rate for people ages 16 to 19 in Nassau County was 19.2% (8.3% in 2019), while the rate for those ages 20 to 24 was 14.9% (9.4% in 2019), according to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. In 2021, the overall county unemployment rate was 6.6% (3.4% in 2019). 

Those figures were provided to Newsday by state Labor Department market analyst Shital Patel from the Hicksville office. 

In Suffolk, the overall unemployment rate in 2021 was 5.7% (3.1% in 2019), compared with 16.4% (11.1% in 2019) for those ages 16 to 19, and 10.6% (5.8% in 2019) for those ages 20 to 24, according to the figures.

Dorothy Roberts, president of the Long Island Hospitality Association, said while restaurants and catering venues have long turned to young applicants, the need has only grown amid a historically tight labor market.

“Especially since the pandemic, when we lost workers in the hospitality industry," she said, "we’ve made an effort to go after and seek that demographic."

With Victor Ocasio

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.