A year into the coronavirus pandemic, one of the clearest signs of how hard the Mobile-area economy has been hit — and how much of it has come back — is showing up in a simple but telling number: the total paycheck available to local workers each month.
That figure, sometimes called aggregate worker income, is calculated by multiplying the number of people employed in each major industry by the average wages those workers earn. Tracked monthly using employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it offers a running gauge of how much money is actually flowing into local households to be spent on rent, groceries, and everything else that keeps the regional economy moving.
In January 2020, before the virus reached Mobile, the local workforce had an estimated $839.5 million available to spend. By July, as shutdowns and reduced hours took their toll, that figure had fallen to $788.4 million, the lowest point of the year. By November 2020, the most recent month for which full data has been published, worker income had climbed back to $819.0 million.
The scale of that swing becomes clearer in historical context. The July low was roughly equivalent to worker income levels last seen in Mobile before 2010, effectively erasing close to a decade of wage growth in a matter of months. The November rebound put the local economy back in the neighborhood of where it stood in 2016 and 2017 — a meaningful recovery, even if it still falls short of pre-pandemic levels.
Because wage rates for most industries have stayed fairly steady over the past several years, the swings in total worker income are driven mainly by how many people are employed rather than by pay cuts. Between January and July, Mobile-area employers shed roughly 11,400 jobs across the ten major industry sectors tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By November, about 6,800 of those positions had been refilled, meaning local businesses had rehired nearly 60 percent of the workers they had let go earlier in the pandemic.
The recovery has not been even across every corner of the economy. Trade, Transportation and Utilities actually added workers over the same stretch, buoyed by continued demand for shipping, retail, and logistics jobs even as much of the economy contracted. Education and Health Services and Professional and Business Activities, by contrast, were among the sectors still showing net job losses through November, reflecting how differently the pandemic has reshaped demand for services depending on the industry.
Taken together, the numbers point to a Mobile-area economy that absorbed a historic shock to household earning power in the spring of 2020 but has since clawed back a majority of what was lost. Economists who track the monthly employment figures say the industry-by-industry breakdown will be worth watching in the months ahead, since shifts in which sectors are hiring — and which are still struggling — say as much about the pandemic’s lingering effects on daily life as the overall dollar totals do.