As we all know, the pandemic has caused a hemorrhaging of jobs in our national economy–a massive decline in April and early May 2020 that has yet to be recouped even with some of the faster job growth months of recent decades during the Summer and early Fall. But there’s a (sort of) glimmer in the darkness. The Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) actually ranks #7 in jobs in 2020 (among the 100 most populous MSAs) while we ranked #9 in 2019–before the onset of the pandemic. Before we congratulate ourselves too much, this is not necessarily because we were “knocking it out of the park”, but is more owing to other metros having even deeper struggles with their economies.

The first chart below shows job levels for our metro economy between 2010 and 2019. Atlanta lost 157,000 jobs between June 2019 and June 2020.  That’s a big number, but it was a lower number than all but 15 other metros (among the 100 most populous in the nation). Atlanta’s percentage loss of nearly 6% of jobs ranked 27th among the metros.

So compared to other metros, we rank better in total jobs in June of 2020 than we did in June 2019. And we have continued to lose less of our job base than have other large metros. The graphic below, from the BLS Employment Situation Report, shows that (among the 12 largest metro areas from October 2019 to October 2020) Atlanta has at 2.8%, behind Dallas and Phoenix, the lowest rate of job loss. It is notable (see above) that Atlanta’s June to June decline was almost three percentage points more than the October to October decline.

A key in Atlanta “gaining” relative position over the past year–even with the overall job loss–has been lower losses in the industries hit hardest by the pandemic. The leisure and hospitality sector suffered severely in Atlanta as it did in most places, but (as shown below) nationally the damage was much worse than it was here. And this pattern holds true in almost all of our industry sectors. While we have a positive growth rate in only the Trade Sector (boosted by the e-commerce wave of the pandemic) and our tiny Mining and Logging sector, in only the Finance sector did Atlanta’s October 2019 to October percentage job loss exceed the national rate of decline.

To compare metros across a host of variable, beyond the job  indicator we look at here, check out our 100 Metros Dashboard–next week, there will be a regional snapshot coming out on it with some selected highlights. For more on COVID-19’s impact on our jobs base, check out the recent 33N post, Pandemic Job Loss, For a far deeper, Marianas Trench-like dive into the Metro Atlanta economy, check out the regional snapshot, A Take on the Pandemic Economy,  But wait…there’s.even. more…next week…with a county-level spatial look at 2019 to 2020 job trends.