Employment on the upswing in Bay Area
Patch, in the Burlingame-Hillsborough area, posted an article about projected growth in employment opportunity in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Burlingame publication reported that Beacon Economics, a research firm for economics based in Los Angeles, released a forecast Oct. 1 stating that it expects non-farm employment in the Bay Area to grow through the end of 2019.
Beacon Economics projected employment growth of 3.5% for both San Francisco and San Mateo Counties. The South Bay Area, which includes Santa Clara and San Benito Counties, can look forward to job growth of 2.5% in the next few months. However, the East Bay, with the largest city there being Oakland, is only expected to have a job growth of 1.5%.
Beacon representatives explained that its forecasting is the result of a 12-month growth trend in each region. The 12-month period Beacon studied ended in August. The actual number of non-farm jobs in the period grew by nearly 1.2 million.
The Bay Area job growth statistics outstripped the rest of the state in terms of growth, which was only 1.8 percent.
Other job statistics in the period Beacon studied include the following:
- South Bay – 1.6 million
- East Bay – 1.2 million
Additionally, Beacon predicted that unemployment in all regions of the San Francisco Bay Area would be approximately three percent, or even lower, through the end of 2019. In fact, the unemployment rate in the city of San Francisco dropped to 2.1 percent during the study period.
Major Bay Area employers
The San Francisco Business Times listed the following companies as the largest employers in the Bay Area. The period for gathering this data was December 2018 through June 2019. The counties included in these rankings are Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo.
Here are the top five employers:
- Kaiser Permanente – 58,269
- Sutter Health – 24,347
- Facebook – 14,000
- Wells Fargo & Co. – 13,483
- Safeway Northern California Division – 13,397
Kaiser Permanente was the only one of these top employers showing an increase in job numbers. However, its increase was a significant 26.55%.
