The Tampa Bay area suffered a sharp decline in employment at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, but its jobless rate is now among the nation's lowest. Unusually, the fastest-growing sector in the past year has been leisure and hospitality. Even more unusual, employment in the sector now exceeds its pre-pandemic level. What's going on?
Key takeaways
Tampa's unemployment rate was 2.5 percent in September, indicating one of the nation's tightest labor markets. In the previous year, employment in leisure and hospitality had risen by almost 12%, the fastest growth of any sector. Despite Tampa's location and reputation, this sector only accounts for about one in eight jobs in the metro area. Yet it is indicative of a broader trend in the market.
Employment in leisure and hospitality in the Tampa area dropped by almost half at the onset of the pandemic. But by early this year, it had recovered all of its losses and was poised to keep growing:
This growth has come in sharp contrast to the situation in the nation as a whole, where the leisure and hospitality sector still has a million fewer employees than it did in February 2020.
What explains this anomaly? Looking at a more granular level, we can see that food and drink establishments have been driving the change. While jobs in accommodation have yet to recover, jobs in boozing and dining have exceeded their previous highs:
"Food services and drinking places" is a much larger category in the government's statistics than "accommodation", and its roughly 10,000 new jobs are driving much of the growth in the sector as a whole. But why would these two trends diverge?
The simple answer is that employment in leisure and hospitality is being driven by residents – who don't need "accommodation" – rather than tourists. Though Americans have shifted billions of dollars in spending into leisure and hospitality (including tourism), Tampa has also picked up plenty of residents since the start of the pandemic. Here is what total non-farm employment looks like in the area:
Employment in the Tampa area is still running below the pre-pandemic trend, but it's on a steep incline that will likely pass the old trend line soon.
As we'd expect, an overall influx of jobholders (and possibly retirees as well) has also created more work in construction, another industry where employment now exceeds its pre-pandemic high:
These figures, which are seasonally adjusted, also suggest that new residents, rather than tourists, have added strength to the labor market's recovery in Tampa. Indeed, several other sources have named the Tampa area as a top destination for domestic migration since the pandemic began.
Not surprisingly, flexible work has been growing alongside the rest of the labor market. Instawork has been staffing increasing numbers of shifts in both hospitality and light industrial roles in 2022, and we expect the volumes to keep rising in the years to come.
These links offer more information:
Instawork Local Labor Market Resources
Bureau of Labor Statistics: Economic Summary
State of Florida Workforce Statistics
City of Tampa Workforce Development
Realtime metrics
These metrics, derived from data aggregated across the Instawork platform, compare the two weeks starting 11/3/2022 to the previous two weeks. To control for the overall growth of the Instawork marketplace, only shifts involving businesses that booked shifts in both periods are included:
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