The Bay Area added jobs in August, primarily powered by a robust upswing in the East Bay — but the region’s primary tech hubs in the South Bay and San Francisco slashed positions, a new report shows.
The nine-county region gained 1,100 jobs during August, the federal labor agency reported on Friday.
The Port of Oakland and the downtown Oakland skyline, April 2024. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
The gains in the Bay Area, however, were largely the result of an addition of 1,800 jobs in the East Bay, which more than offset job losses in the region’s main hubs for the still-wobbly tech sector.
RELATED: Massive layoffs for Cisco and IBM erase hundreds of Bay Area tech jobs
The South Bay lost 600 jobs in August while the San Francisco-San Mateo metro area shed 400 jobs, the new report shows.
Related Articles
Massive layoffs for Cisco and IBM erase hundreds of Bay Area tech jobs
Walnut Creek’s police are the highest paid city employees. Their unions just secured another raise.
Amazon boosts warehouse worker pay by $1.50 to $22 hourly
Is inflation cured? Fed’s giant rate cut turns focus to cooling job market
East Bay Georgia-Pacific union workers vow to stay on strike until a fair contract comes their way
The monthly update on the job markets in California and its metro regions arrives on the heels of a disclosure by San Jose-based Cisco Systems that the tech titan intends to slash 842 Bay Area jobs while IBM revealed its decision to chop another 112 jobs in the region.
The San Francisco-San Mateo region has now lost jobs for eight consecutive months, a forbidding trend that reinforces perceptions that San Francisco has descended into a “doom loop” of a fading economy and relentless employment losses.
The South Bay is beginning to show longer-term weakness. The Santa Clara County region has lost jobs for three consecutive months, according to this news organization’s review of the monthly employment reports.
California is beginning to show signs of a faltering job market. California gained only 6,800 jobs in August, which was a sharp drop off from the statewide increase of 43,300 jobs in May, 20,800 in June and 29,900 in July.
The statewide unemployment rate worsened to 5.3% in August, up from 5.2% in July, the government report showed.
The last time the California jobless rate was below 5% was in August 2023. The current levels of unemployment in California are far worse than the state’s all-time low of 3.9% that was achieved two years ago in August 2022.
