This Is What Happened to Employment in the 10 Largest Counties, and It’s Bad

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 20, 7:40AM EST

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This Is What Happened to Employment in the 10 Largest Counties, and It’s Bad — © Joecho-16 / Getty Images

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the primary source of employment data in the United States. It issues the monthly unemployment rates that cover the entire country, states and America’s largest cities. Among its other reports is one called the “County Employment and Wages Summary.” That report was just released for the second quarter of the year. Although it covers the nation’s 357 largest counties based on population, it focuses on the 10 largest. The drop in employment in these counties over the past year is breathtakingly large.

According to the report, employment, based on total people with jobs, dropped in all 357 counties measured in the period from June 2019 to June 2020. The total number of people employed was 135.1 million, down by 9.4%.

The largest drop was in Atlantic County, New Jersey, where the number of people employed fell by 34.2%. The smallest declines were in Cleveland County, Oklahoma, and Utah County, Utah. Each posted a loss of 0.2%.

The 10 largest counties are home to America’s largest cities. These include Cook County, which includes Chicago; Harris County, which includes Houston; Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix; and King County, which includes Seattle.

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These are America’s 10 largest counties and the employment change from June 2019 to June 2020.

County	Employment (thousands)	Change
Los Angeles, California	3,945.3	−12.2%
Cook, Illinois	2,297.3	−13.1%
New York, New York	2,048.7	−18.8%
Harris, Texas	2,179.4	−7.3%
Maricopa, Arizona	1,924.6	−4.6%
Dallas, Texas	1,623.5	−5.8%
Orange, California	1,442.0	−12.7%
San Diego, California	1,325.1	−11.2%
King, Washington	1,312.9	−8.9%
Miami-Dade, Florida	1,036.8	−9.3%

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.