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 fill gaps in their overall staffing, as well as for the typical seasonal jobs at amusement parks, landscaping companies and restaurants.

The region’s labor force swelled by 12,000 workers from May to July, and nearly all of them found jobs. The unemployment rate in July was 3.3% – within spitting distance of the all-time low – and the number of people holding jobs was at its highest level in almost 15 years.

“This means that people entering the labor force are finding work quickly as the demand for labor remains high,” Golebiewski and her Canisius colleagues George Palumbo and Mark Zaporowski said in a report released Thursday.

The August job numbers are based on a survey of businesses that was conducted in mid-August, just as colleges were gearing up to resume classes. While the August job losses were steeper than what you normally see, the timing of the survey could have caught the exodus of college students when it was in full swing.

“It could be that students – particularly college students – had left their jobs in preparation for returning to school the next week,” Golebiewski said.

If she’s right – and the September job report next month will give us a better idea of whether the August swoon really was just a blip – it underscores the oversized impact that students are having on a job market that badly needs more workers.

“The students are definitely affecting what we’ve been seeing in terms of job losses and job gains,” Golebiewski said. “The market was so tight without them, that their entry into the labor market during the summer is what drives those changes.”

There are other signs supporting Glass’ and Golebiewski’s hunch that the August slump isn’t a harbinger of gloom as much as a seasonal swing. For one, weekly jobless claims across the Buffalo Niagara region remain very low and are giving no indication that more workers are losing their jobs.

Odds are, if someone is leaving a job, they’re doing it by their own choosing – as a student would when classes are going to resume, Golebiewski said.

One of the biggest chunks of job losses last month came from the leisure and hospitality sector, which had been hiring like gangbusters early in the summer, but shed 1,300 jobs in August. Usually, a drop like that doesn’t show up until the September jobs report.

Even so, that’s only about 14% of the jobs that those bars and restaurants and hotels had added since the end of April. Another weak spot was the category that includes temporary jobs through employment agencies.

At the same time, construction jobs held steady, while the number of manufacturing jobs in the region inched slightly higher and now is at a 15-year high.

“We still seem to be pretty good in the goods-producing stuff,” Glass said. “That’s a good thing because traditionally, these manufacturing jobs are better paying and have better benefits and they tend to be a little more stable.”

After August’s big drop, stability would be welcome. But what the region really needs is a sustained push like it experienced during the first part of summer, where more people start looking for jobs and eager employers snap them up.

That’s the only way the region will close its jobs gap, because while the rest of the country has regained all of the jobs lost during the pandemic, we still haven’t recovered 1 of every 40 jobs that vanished during the depths of the lockdown.

And as the August job numbers showed, that’s a sign of just how badly the region needs more people who want work.