California's weird job situation

Oakland, California - Despite inflation, supply chain bottlenecks and declining economic indicators, the Golden State's hiring juggernaut keep moving forward at an astonishing pace. The best and most recent data shows that job growth in California continues to defy economic gravity.

That is the position of employment lawyer and former EDD Director Michael Bernick, who has never seen this in more than 40 years of practice.

In every other major downturn, jobs have also gone down, except this time. "Actually all of the other economic indicators have been going in the other direction. Housing sales are down.  Consumer sentiment down. Small business confidence," said Bernick. 

In fact, California, outperformed the nation with almost 85,000 new hires in a state that has about 12% of the nation's workforce 

"That was16% of all the jobs created in the United States and well above the average of over 70,000 jobs we've seen over the past year," said Bernick.

California, in just two years, regained virtually all 2 million jobs the pandemic destroyed in a third of the time it took to regain Great Recession job losses and blew away the low pre-pandemic unemployment rate. 

"The lowest rate since the current methodology was introduced in 1976," said Bernick.

And, with well over a million jobs still available, finding enough workers remains tough because a smaller percentage of potential workers want to work, Almost 40% of working people, don't. 

"The labor participation rate is still well below what we saw prior to the pandemic and very well below what we had in the 1980s," said Bernick.

Finally, the number of people quitting declined a bit but still remain high, making hiring even harder. All that said, the most disadvantaged in looking for work are older workers. 

"Any worker over 50, it becomes particularly difficult and that's just the truth," said Bernick