IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
The Inland Empire recorded a 7.2 percent unemployment rate in May, down slightly from April and well below the 14.9 percent predicted one year ago.
Riverside County’s unemployment rate was 7.2 percent, San Bernardino County’s 7.3 percent, according to data released last week by the California Employment Development Department.
One year ago, those numbers were 15.3 percent and 13.4 percent, respectively, or a combined 14.3 percent.
About 134,000 non-agricultural jobs were added in the two-county region between May of 2020 and last month.
Leisure and hospitality added 3,300 jobs in May, the most of any Inland sector. Government added 1,800 jobs, construction added 1,600, manufacturing went up by 1,300, and trade, transportation and utilities added 700 jobs.
Also during May of this year, the state unemployment rate was 7.5 percent and the national unemployment rate 5.5 percent.
The above numbers are unadjusted, meaning they don’t take into account season factors that typically affect the economy
In the past four months, California’s economy has added nearly 500,000 jobs, a hiring surge on par with last summer’s hiring increase. Still, as of last month, there were about 1.3 million fewer people employed in California than in February 2020.
“It has been an encouraging few months, with employment growth in California outpacing the rate of growth nationally in 2021,” said Taner Osman, research manager at Beacon Economics in Los Angeles and the UC Riverside Center for Forecasting, in a statement. “Although the labor market recovery in the state lags the nation overall, the recent reopening of California’s economy will hopefully go some way towards closing that gap.”
