A relatively easy, but nonetheless effective, way to assess city labor markets is to rank them in two ways: (1) according to year-over-year jobs-count percentage changes, from biggest to smallest; and (2) by unemployment rates, from lowest to highest.
For (1), I’d normally say from fastest to slowest, but that doesn’t currently apply. Due to the pandemic, the y/y number-employed changes for all 51 of America’s biggest cities are negative. Therefore, the ordering of urban areas according to (1) goes from those with the mildest y/y ‘total jobs’ contractions (i.e., best) to those with the most severe (i.e., worst).
In Table 1, rankings (1) and (2) are shown side-by-side. Placing them next to each other facilitates a judgement as to which cities are doing best with respect to their labor markets.
The six cities with green shadings in Table 1 are among the Top 10 for both smallest job losses and tightest unemployment rates. The half dozen labor market winners are Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Austin, Dallas-Ft Worth and Kansas City.
