By: Jacob McConnell
In the local Santa Cruz newspapers, journalists express their joy as the winter storms slow and Spring season begins. After a multiyear- historic drought in the bay area, the winter of 2016-2017 brought massive amounts of much needed rain and within a few short months, officially put an end to the worst water shortage in state history. I, along with the rest of Santa Cruz county am grateful for the relieving effects of the successful winter. While I do not intend to undermine the severity of the drought, I have began noticing articles and statistics that seem skeptical in regards to the actual positive impact the rain has had on our community.
What caught my attention were a few graphs of the labor statistics of Santa Cruz County intended to highlight the increase in labor force at the end of the drought. Below is a snapshot of the Santa Cruz County Labor force depicted over the first two months of 2017.
At a quick glance, the graph displays a steep and steady increase in employment. The line actually increases 4-fold within the presented graph. However, simply looking at the numbers on the y-axis one can notice that the actual number of employees that joined the workforce was less than 1000. Out of the 131,250 workers, this increase is actually less than an 1% increase in employment. Admittedly however, if kept steady, this would result in an over 6% increase in employment for 2017, which would be very impressive.
After calculating this potential rise in numbers of the workforce, I too began believing the heavy rain quite possibly could be creating this increase in thousands of local jobs. The news mentions how our agriculture, flood and beach clean-ups, creek visits, landscaping, construction, and tourism were all benefiting from this winter. Though it is hard deny these claims, I noticed a trend in all the jobs being highlighted: they are all seasonal.
As a beach town centered around tourism and agriculture, some of Santa Cruz’s biggest producers of jobs are the beach boardwalk, the university, and the local farms. These organizations base large portions of their business on part-time and young workers. In order to analyze a trend in part-time seasonal work within Santa Cruz County, I pulled a graph of the 2016 labor force over the entire year.
By simply viewing this fully depicted graph, it can easily be concluded that there is a large spike in employment during the summer months. The start of 2016 is identical to 2017’s start shown in the original graph. It is hard to simply rule out the end of the drought as a job creator, but history shows it is more likely to be a seasonal trend in local employment rather than an actual positive impact the excessive rain had on the community.
Sources
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/departments/water/drought/weekly-water-conditions
http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/departments/water/drought/2015-water-supply-outlook
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/NE/20170126/NEWS/170129769