Pennsylvania unemployment dips to 6.6% in July
(The Center Square) – Pennsylvania unemployment dipped to 6.6% in July, the fifth straight month of decline, the Department of Labor and Industry said Friday.
About 16,000 fewer people looked for work last month as a result, the department said. Unemployment also fell 6.4% from July 2020, though it’s still more than one percentage point ahead of the national rate of 5.4%.
Most sectors continued a gradual recovery of jobs, but trail their February 2020 levels. Leisure and hospitality added 85,500 over the last 12 months, the department said, the largest of all 11 industry “supersectors.”
The Independent Fiscal Office said in April that the hospitality and leisure sector experienced a disproportionate amount of job loss throughout the pandemic as the administration’s mitigation measures targeted their operations as sources of community spread.
IFO Executive Director Matthew Knittel said workforce for the sector declined 26.3% over the past year, compared to 5.4% across all other industries. Revenues likewise plummeted 55.1% for the sector, compared to just 32.6% for all others.
In January, the state authorized a $145 million relief program that offers grants worth up to $50,000 for small establishments struggling to recover after more than a year of pandemic restrictions.
Gov. Tom Wolf has been crisscrossing the state, visiting restaurants and bars where the grants have been helpful, including Silantra Asian Street Kitchen in Lancaster.
The establishment’s owner, Sam Guo, said he used a $15,000 grant from the aid program to raise wages for his current and future employees. It’s been especially useful, he said, in light of an ongoing labor shortage.
“The hospitality industry was especially hard hit by COVID-19 and we needed to do something to step in,” Wolf said in July. “I think every county had an application in within 28 hours and within a week, it [money] was all out.”
Three in 10 businesses shut down, at least temporarily, at the height of the pandemic in March and April, according to federal data, after the Wolf administration enacted some of the strictest mitigation efforts nationwide.
Wolf has said he won’t reinstate shutdowns, even as COVID-19 cases caused by variants rise in the state. That’s why he said vaccination remains a priority – and on that front, Pennsylvania “is making good progress.”
About 64.7% of all residents are fully vaccinated, according to the Department of Health. It also ranks 5th in the nation for total amount of doses administered.
“I think what we need to do is redouble our efforts on vaccines so we make sure we never have to go through what we went through that forced us to come up with this money in the first place,” Wolf said in July.
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