Most jobs in NYC history? Okay, let’s talk about it.

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Mayor Eric Adams has long boasted about New York City’s thriving economy and breaking the all-time high jobs record for the eighth time since the start of his administration. Commendable. However, he doesn’t often mention the city’s persisting disparities among Black unemployment rates and gender pay inequities.

“As a result of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases, job growth has slowed across the U.S. over the past year and a half. Against that backdrop of slower job growth, NYC’s private job growth was slightly higher than the nation’’s overall last year,” said James A. Parrott, Ph.D., a senior advisor and senior fellow at the Center for NYC Affairs at the New School.

It has now been five years since the initial COVID outbreak in February 2020. By mid-2023, the city’s private sector had fully recovered from the steep job loss incurred early in the pandemic, according to the City Comptroller’s office in its monthly Economic and Fiscal Outlook snapshot. Kids are back in school — and will never have another real snow day, thanks to the handy pivot to virtual classes. Commuters have gone back to using the subways, and tourists have returned to walk (frustratingly slowly) through the city’s streets once more.

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The city currently has about 4.1 million (4,151,400 annual average) private sector jobs — that is, positions such as home health aides and hospital staff, high-wage finance positions, and professional services. In the aftermath of COVID, the city lost more than 900,000 jobs in two months, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). There’s been significant growth in the city’s tech, life sciences, and green economy fields. The city is also pushing to be a leader on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and startup front, which will be key in developing AI research and scaling AI-related businesses.

The good news: According to the latest NYCEDC State of the Economy report, the city is indeed seeing record high levels of employment and labor force participation, remains the nation’s top destination for young talent, and is seeing unemployment rates trend downward for all demographics.

At a press conference last week, Adams kicked off “Jobs Week,” again mentioning the all-time high jobs record. He announced the Race for Space initiative, which includes a pilot program for relocating jobs to the city, expanding support for international companies, and upgrading aging offices to high-quality office spaces. Most of these efforts are aimed at addressing commercial vacancies, usually in Manhattan, that are left over from the pandemic.

“Our goal is to make New York City the best place to raise a family,” said Adams at last week’’s presser. “That means keeping money in the pockets of New Yorkers.”

Melissa Pumphrey, senior vice president for Economic Research & Policy at NYCEDC, said some of that COVID recovery is definitely tied to initiatives and policies from the mayor’s office that increased job opportunities for New Yorkers. These include, to name a few, Project labor agreements with labor councils to support fair wages, community hiring, and Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprises (M/WBEs); Future Ready NYC, which connects public high school students to jobs in building, human, and social services; and investments in Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP).

The not-so-great news: Long-standing challenges will remain in housing costs, lack of affordability, racial disparities in employment, and stubborn gaps between highest and lowest earners. “The rebound from the pandemic in NYC has been extremely lopsided, with most of the wage and income growth being concentrated at the top of the income spectrum. NYC wage growth 2019 to 2024 among the top 5% far exceeds wage gains for everyone else,” said Parrott in a statement.

Poverty has risen in both the city and state, with 50% more persons receiving cash assistance in late 2024 compared to 2019, Parrott said. A stream of economic hardships continues to affect the job market, such as the lack of housing affordability, threat of evictions, and migrant influx.

The NYCEDC noted that some of the nation’s struggle to overcome inflation, interest rates, and gross domestic product (GDP) is beyond the city’s control. The best example would be the unreasonably high price of eggs this month due to the avian flu outbreak. The current “U.S. macroeconomic environment” also has to contend with the new policies of the Trump administration, particularly with regard to taxes and trade. Inflated housing costs, however, are firmly an issue that’s been compounding for decades and the city can do better with long-term solutions, said the NYCEDC.

In a more nuanced conversation about Black jobs, unemployment rates are down across the board for all demographics in the city, but the rest of that statistic is still a “troubling indicator of a very uneven NYC economic recovery” from COVID, said Parrott. Black unemployment in the city rose to 8.5% in 2024, after falling to 7.3% previously. This still marks an overall improvement (down from 10.7% at the start of 2022), but the white unemployment rate averaged just 3.3% over this same period. The labor force participation rate for white New Yorkers was at 67.5% in 2024, which is well above the rates for other races and ethnicities.

The NYCEDC posited that this is because of certain challenges that have a disproportionate impact on the city’s Black workforce, in keeping with national trends of racial bias and exclusion. Many Black workers are in sectors with “seasonal hiring patterns,” such as education or transportation. They are also largely represented in sectors that have not recovered from COVID job losses, such as retail and city government.

Meanwhile, women represented 60% of the city’s workforce in the industries hardest hit by the pandemic, according to the NYCEDC, many of whom have gone back to work at full force and outpace men in participating in the city’s job market. Those numbers don’t home in on the pay parity issues for Black and Brown women, though. These women end up in critical jobs like nonprofit organizations, human services, social work, childcare services, and counseling, but are often paid less than their male and white counterparts.

“The tremendous pay inequities that result from those city-funded contracts continue and the city should do a lot more to close the 20% to 30% pay gap between the employees of nonprofit human services providers and their counterparts working for the City of New York,” said Parrott. “This workforce is very well-educated, and predominantly women of color.”