![]() These dismal projections follow 2020, which saw 80 percent of businesses report revenue decreases from 2019, forcing 70 percent of business owners to exhaust their personal and business cash reserves to pay business expenses. Having only 36 percent of businesses expecting that their 2021 revenues would increase means little room for additional hiring, leaving many unemployed with expiring benefits few job opportunities. Nearly half of surveyed businesses told the Federal Reserve that they expected their 2021 revenues to decrease as compared with 2020, and another 19 percent said that their revenues would remain unchanged. The national economy is faring no better, which since last February has lost nearly 10 million jobs bringing those receiving some form of unemployment or pandemic relief benefits to over 18 million people. This is not good news for the 55,000 unemployed Long Islanders looking for work, especially in the travel, tourism, restaurant, entertainment and hotel and hospitality sectors, which come to life during the warm summer months, especially when the region has lost 104,700 jobs since December 2019. If these job forecasts for 2021 were not disappointing enough, nearly 60 percent of businesses either furloughed or fired employees in 2020. Half are expecting no change in their employees, while 70 percent would not hire additional workers. The Federal Reserve, who is intent on keeping interest rates as low as possible so as not to slow the economy any further, disclosed that their recent nationwide survey of 9,693 businesses, including 216 from New York, indicated that 20 percent of New York business expect to shed jobs by the summer of 2021. ![]() But the suffering economy continues, bringing little relief for those Long Islanders who want to work and businesses desperate to reopen. Making matters more exasperating has been the slow and chaotic roll out of the vaccines, which by most accounts are months away from the herd immunity so critical for any widespread economic recovery to begin. It is hard to find anyone who has not been impacted, whether it be contracting the coronavirus or losing someone who succumbed to it, or the businesses forced to close with the prospects of not reopening and employees whose job my never return. ![]() It is hard to fathom that New Yorkers have endured one year under the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic and are on the cusp of beginning year two. ![]()
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