There are fewer workers in the Buffalo Niagara region

Buffalo Niagara’s workforce is shrinking again — and that’s bad news for the region’s quest to recover from the Covid-19 downturn.

The region’s pool of available workers grew fairly steadily until last November, closing in on 4,000 people from its pre-Covid peak in March 2020.

But since then, the local labor pool has continued to shrink. It has now been falling for four consecutive months – a drop which has seen an additional 6,500 people either stop working or look for work.

This is concerning because companies need an ever-increasing pool of available workers when they want to hire. It’s this shortage of available people that has made recruiting so difficult in the wake of the pandemic – and it’s why job growth in the region during the recovery has lagged well behind the rest of the country.

Today, the local job market is less active, economists say. The region’s unemployment rate, which fell to 3.3% for much of the spring and early summer of 2023, has now risen gradually to 4.2%. That’s still low by local standards – and a sign of a strong labor market – but it’s also another indication of growing underutilization in the labor market.