photo by: Nick Krug/Journal-World Photo

Downtown Lawrence is pictured in this aerial photo from December 2017.

Perhaps you plan to embark on an ancient activity that we once thought was relegated to drawings on the walls of caves: a summer vacation. If so, know that the DNA of children has not changed since your last one. They still will ask the time-immortal question: How much longer?

It is a fair question to ask in Lawrence about another arduous journey — the community’s trek to regain all the jobs it lost during the pandemic.

So, how much longer?

This is me turning to the back seat with an exasperated look. We are barely out of the driveway. You can still see the house from here for crying out X!%#! Indeed, the latest numbers show Douglas County has regained a far smaller share of lost jobs than the state as a whole and most of the other metro areas in the state.

The state recently released its employment totals for May. As expected, they look pretty good compared to May 2020. After all, we were in the midst of the pandemic in May 2020, while in May 2021 we were in the midst of a vaccine-fueled reopening.

Job numbers are up both statewide and in Douglas County from May 2020 to May 2021. Job totals in Douglas County are up by 1,200 jobs since May 2020. The hard-hit leisure and hospitality sector has seen a 37% increase in jobs in Lawrence since a year ago.

That’s good news, if not particularly surprising news.

But the more interesting numbers are comparing May 2021 totals to May 2019, which of course was a time period when the economy wasn’t dealing with the pandemic. Here are the key numbers for Douglas County. Lawrence and the rest of the county lost 6,800 jobs from May 2019 to May 2020. (Back in June 2020 we reported a local job loss number that was closer to 5,000. But as state economists are prone to do, they subsequently revised those job losses upward to 6,800.) Douglas County has regained 1,200 of those 6,800 lost jobs. In other words, we’ve regained 17.6% of those lost jobs.

That is a far smaller percentage than what the entire state is seeing. Statewide, Kansas lost 122,400 jobs from May 2019 to May 2020. It has regained 68,900 of them for a percentage of 56.2%. In other words, Kansas is past the halfway mark, while Lawrence has yet to reach the quarter pole.

Many of the state’s metro areas also are seeing a much quicker jobs recovery. The Kansas City, Kan., metro area lost 40,900 jobs during the time period. It has recovered 68% of them, or about 28,000. Topeka lost 8,600 jobs. It has recovered 55%, or about 4,800 jobs. Wichita lost 32,500 jobs, but has recovered 48%, or about 15,700 jobs.

So, why are they going so much faster than us? This is me cranking up the 1990s radio station. That will teach people in the back seat to stop asking me questions I don’t know the answer to.

What I can do, though, is point to someone who is in even worse shape than us. There is always that old, slow-moving VW bus that you manage to pass on the interstate. At the moment, that is Manhattan. The numbers show that Manhattan actually hasn’t started its jobs recovery yet. Manhattan lost 4,600 jobs from May 2019 to May 2020. Since May 2020, it has lost an additional 100 jobs. In other words, its job losses have grown by another 2%.

Obviously, Manhattan and Lawrence are the two largest college communities in the state. The numbers suggest that may have something to do with the slowness of the recovery in those two cities.

Specifically, both cities continue to have government job totals that are far below what they were even a year ago, let alone before the pandemic. Lawrence’s government job totals — which includes most employees at KU — are still down almost 7.5% from their levels in May 2020. Compare that to the state as whole. Total government jobs in Kansas are up 1.4% over the last year. The disconnect between the state numbers and the numbers in Manhattan is even greater. Government jobs in Manhattan are down by 10.4%. That’s why Manhattan hasn’t seen a jobs recovery yet. It has lost 1,400 government jobs and the private sector simply hasn’t been able to grow at a fast enough pace yet to make up for that. Manhattan’s private-sector grew jobs at a 5.1% rate for the year. Lawrence’s private-sector jobs grew at a 7.6% rate for the year.

I’ve noted this government jobs trend in Lawrence and Manhattan before, but it is still prevalent, so I note it again. I’m guessing we are going to spend the rest of this year in Lawrence asking, “how much longer” on the jobs recovery. So, I’ll work to keep an eye on future sets of numbers as they are released by the state.

Certainly, there are signs that Lawrence’s jobs totals could pick up significantly. There are lots of help wanted signs, and a couple of big manufacturing projects are under construction in Lawrence VenturePark.

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An equally interesting situation to watch this year will be how much success employers have in finding employees to fill open jobs. That will factor into Lawrence’s job recovery too.

With Lawrence still down 5,600 jobs from its pre-pandemic level, you might expect the unemployment rate to be pretty high. It is not. The unemployment rate in Douglas County for May was 3.5%. That’s down from 9.9% in May 2020. It is up from 2.7% in May 2019. The current statewide unemployment rate is 3.7%, down from 9.3% a year ago.

Another way to look at it is that there were about 6,800 Douglas County residents unemployed in May 2020. In May 2021, there were about 2,200. That’s only about 500 more people unemployed than pre-pandemic. Yet, our job totals are about 5,000 positions fewer than pre-pandemic.

Yes, there are more people on unemployment than before the pandemic, but not thousands more in Douglas County.

Instead, a number that may be playing a greater role involves commuters and people who have just decided to retire or quit looking for work. First, numbers on people who have decided to give up on the working life. In both May of 2019 and May of 2020 Douglas County had about 66,000 people in the labor force. Now, it has about 64,300. Maybe Douglas County has lost some population, but more likely is that the number of people retiring from the workforce outnumbers the people joining the workforce by about 1,600 people. That equates to about a 2.5% shrinkage of available workers in Douglas County in the last year. That makes for a tighter labor market.

But the bigger impact may be commuters. The state’s numbers don’t specifically list the number of people who live in a county but commute outside of it for work. But they give a glimpse, if you are willing to do the math. In May 2021, we know there were 62,110 Douglas County residents who were employed somewhere. We also know there were 49,000 jobs located inside Douglas County. That means at least 13,110 residents were commuting somewhere outside of the county for work. In reality the number is higher because we know not all 49,000 jobs in the county are filled by county residents. So, that’s why I say there were at least 13,110 commuters. That commuter number represented 21% of all employed residents of Douglas County.

If you do the same math for May 2019, there were at least 9,530 commuters. They represented just under 15% of all employed residents of Douglas County.

That’s a big jump that should serve as a big reminder as we enter local election season on the importance of growing local jobs.