After losing her longtime restaurant job at the beginning of the pandemic, Emilia McGrath scrambled to find a backup plan.
She traded in her apartment in Boston for her childhood bedroom in Bowdoin, Maine, moving in with parents to briefly work at a private school. Eventually, the 28-year-old found a job working on exhibits at a children’s museum a couple of hours away.
That short-term plan has become a permanent one. McGrath makes less than she did in restaurants but has far better benefits, including paid time off, health insurance and a predictable schedule. For now, at least, she’s done with restaurants.
“It feels like a healthy change,” she said.
Nearly three years since the coronavirus pandemic upended the labor market, restaurants, bars, hotels and casinos remain short-staffed, with nearly 2 million unfilled openings. The leisure and hospitality industry, which before the pandemic accounted for much of the country’s job growth, is still short roughly 500,000 employees from 2020 levels, even as many other sectors have recovered.
But these workers didn’t disappear. A lot of them, like McGrath, who were laid off early in the pandemic, moved to behind-the-scenes office work where they are more likely to have increased flexibility, stability and often better pay.
Employment in professional and business services — a catchall category that includes office jobs in accounting, engineering, law and other white-collar firms — has soared by 1.4 million during the pandemic. And tens of thousands of additional people are working in finance, construction, and transportation and warehousing.