The Bay Area Real Estate Journal
New Study: Cloudy Long-term Jobs Picture for Silicon Valley
Submitted February 23, 2010, 12:42 PM
For job-obsessed real estate, the newly published 2010 Index of Silicon Valley contains valuable nuggets about Santa Clara and San Mateo counties’ labor force, now and looking forward. They do not bode well based on the premise that the greater the number of employed, the stronger is demand for real property from housing to shop space to workplace.
In what is perhaps the biggest unreported employment trend: more and more of the valley’s workers are un-tethered consultants. These are workers who often have lost a corporate job, can’t find another and have become independent free agents with no employees and little appetite for leasing offices.
“I think it amounts to a fundamental shift, a new form of corporate capitalism with huge transformative effects,” said Russell Hancock, president and chief executive of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network. Joint Venture publishes the annual index with the Community Foundation. According to this year’s report, from 2002 through 2007, the number of valley consultants grew from less than 100,000 to more than 120,000.
Meanwhile, total employment in the counties is shrinking. In 1998, the number of employed residents (people who both live and work in the two counties) was 1.3 million. At the end of last year, it was closer to 1.1 million. At the same time, the total number of jobs (held by both residents and non-residents of the two counties) peaked in 2000 at close to 1.6 million. Ten years later, that total is below 1.4 million.
Finally, the report casts interesting light on the emerging green jobs movement. While the number of green jobs in the two counties grew 24 percent from 2004 through 2008, they total only about 14,000 today, about the same as the medical-device sector. The report defines green jobs as those producing products or services that help lower energy, cut dependence on fossil fuels or reduce polluting emissions.
By way of comparison, community infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, banks, retailers and local governments produce the overwhelming bulk of valley jobs, rising to 800,000 in mid-2008, the report says. In contrast, jobs in so-called driving industries are much fewer. Information technology—the next largest employment sector in Silicon Valley—accounts for 300,000 jobs. The life sciences, the smallest industrial sector, account for less than 50,000.
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