Report: Pittsburgh’s employment rates are on a ‘slow but steady’ road back to pre-pandemic levels

The Pennsylvania Economy League of Greater Pittsburgh’s annual report showed that while some industries have made their way to pre-pandemic levels of employment, as a whole, the Steel City is still at about 97% of where it used to be, even as national level employment has returned to its pre-pandemic rate.

Yet Allegheny Conference on Community Development VP of Market Research Jim Futrell told Technical.ly that because Pittsburgh still saw a historically high employment growth rate for the region in 2022 at a 2.9% increase, there’s more cause for hope for the future than concern.

“There’s slow and steady progress,” Futrell said.

The region also saw the unemployment rate rise from 3.9% present in October 2022 to 4.3% as of January 2023. Part of this, the VP said, could be attributed to the seasonal nature of certain industries.

“Some people, for instance, might’ve just decided to take a break for the winter,” Futrell said, while some might be “correlated with [a] drop in construction, employment because construction tends to be a highly seasonal industry.” (Speaking of construction: The industry fell to 89% of pre-pandemic employment levels after the construction of the Shell petrochemical plant ended.)

See the report

In the way of progress, the report showed that compared to the previous year, in December 2022 there was a 2.1% increase in employment. Other industries that saw improvement were transportation and warehousing, information, professional and business services, and utilities, all of which exceeded their pre-pandemic levels of employment. According to Futrell, that’s because those industries were already strong and benefited from the presence of distribution centers that have been built by companies such as Amazon and Lowe’s.

Likewise, Futrell noted that the region’s leisure and hospitality and educational services sectors had also experienced substantial growth. Whereas in previous years, educational services had lagged behind other fields in previous years, by December 2022 it became the city’s strongest industry, with an employment rate increase of 7.3% compared to the 3.7% seen at the national level.

Jim Futrell. (Courtesy photo)

The leisure and hospitality industry suffered particularly during 2020 and 2021 when much of the public was still sequestered at home. In years prior, dips in employment often came during the fall and winter due to the aforementioned nature of seasonal workers. Now that in-person events are occurring more often, Futrell said, you see more workers in the field.

He cautioned that there are areas within the industry that need to catch up; a lag in employment still remains for workers in eating and drinking spaces. Moving forward, Futrell observed that it would be important to remember that other cities with a similarly stagnating population shared in the aforementioned trends. Pittsburgh is in league with Milwaukee, Cleveland and Baltimore, all of which are around 97% of pre-pandemic employment levels. By 2024, he believes the Steel City will have returned to pre-pandemic levels of employment.

“We started 2022 at about 95% of pre-pandemic employment levels [and] we’re now at 97%. I anticipate that kind of trend to continue,” Futrell said. “At this point, there’s some downward pressure on employment growth now within the broader national economy, so I think it’s going to be 2024 before we get above pre-pandemic employment levels.”