David Robinson: Students fueled summer hiring. Their return to school caused big job losses

The summer job gains that came when classes ended disappeared entirely last month when those students headed back to school.

New data from the state Labor Department showed that the region absorbed unusually severe job losses last month, after enjoying unusually robust job growth during the early days of summer.

Local economists were surprised by the severity of the August job losses, which wiped out 5,300 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis. It essentially brought the local job market back to where it was at the end of last year, wiping out every job that had been added during the course of 2023.

The bottom line: What had been a hopeful sign that the Buffalo Niagara job market was finally starting to shake out of the doldrums that had kept it from recovering all of the jobs lost during the Covid pandemic instead turned into a fleeting flurry of hiring.

Normally, that kind of job loss would signal an economic catastrophe – a series of job cuts wiping out hundreds of jobs at a time – but beyond the closing of the local Yellow Corp. trucking operations in midsummer, that hasn’t been the case.

And that’s why the economists aren’t pushing the panic button quite yet.

“I was surprised by the size of the drop. But it doesn’t ring any alarm bells yet,” said Julie Anna Golebiewski, a Canisius College economist.

“I wouldn’t read too much into it,” said Timothy Glass, the labor department’s regional economist in Buffalo. “There wasn’t any shock or anything to attribute this to.”

Instead, they think much of the volatility stems from the region’s worker-starved job market, where companies continue to struggle to find all of the employees they want to hire.

“It might be more of a seasonal thing,” Glass said. “It may be early layoffs.”

When school ended and students started looking for summer jobs, companies eagerly snapped them up, using them to…