More on California's job loss

I track employment in what I call the white-collar core — finance, insurance, tech, and professional & business services (FIIPB). These are the industries that powered job growth in every major metro for decades.

In California, they’re all contracting (2022Q4-2025Q4).

San Francisco: -9.9%
Sacramento: -9.3%
San Diego: -8.5%
San Jose: -8.4%
Los Angeles: -7.6%

This is not just a Bay Area tech story. Sacramento and San Diego are losing white-collar jobs nearly as fast as Silicon Valley.

The table includes a column I call FIIPB Impact — it measures how many percentage points of a metro’s total employment were wiped out by white-collar losses alone. It captures a double whammy: metros get hit hardest when they have a high concentration of these jobs AND a steep decline. San Francisco (-3.3 pp) and San Jose (-3.2 pp) score worst in the country on this measure. The white-collar contraction alone was enough to pull both metros into negative overall job growth.

But here’s what makes this more than a California correction. Look at overall job growth in the last column — San Diego, Sacramento, and LA are all still adding jobs. The rest of their economies are healthy. One slice — the office-based, knowledge-work core — is shrinking while everything else keeps growing.

When output in these industries keeps rising but employment doesn’t follow, something structural has changed.

I dig into what’s driving it in the latest Labor Matters.

Source: BLS