353 Jobs Gone, Labor Force Shrinking: San Diego's Economy Sends Mixed Signals
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San Diego County's unadjusted unemployment rate held at 4.7 percent in July, tying the year's high, according to data from the California Employment Development Department. The seasonally adjusted figure of 4.3 percent trails Orange County at 4.2 percent and San Francisco at 3.9 percent — positioning San Diego behind both of its major California peer metros. The most telling figure in the dataset may be the labor force count itself: 1.63 million workers in July, the lowest in three years and roughly 49,000 below the March 2025 peak.
Two WARN Act notices filed this week deepened that picture. ServiceNow is eliminating 133 San Diego positions, with terminations scheduled by September 28th. The company characterizes the cuts as strategic restructuring rather than financial distress, and the reductions are concentrated at senior and director levels — suggesting a flattening of management layers rather than a retreat from core operations. Still, 133 senior-level departures represent significant household income leaving the region, and raises questions about whether San Diego's cost structure is making it harder to retain corporate leadership even from otherwise healthy employers.
Stone Brewing's notice carries a different kind of weight. Two hundred and twenty positions are being cut, with the first phase of layoffs scheduled for October 19th. Stone built itself into a flagship of San Diego's craft brewing identity, and the pressures behind the cuts are not company-specific: nationally, craft beer consumption has been declining as consumers migrate toward ready-to-drink products, hard seltzers, and wine alternatives. Stone is, in this reading, a casualty of a category shift.
Together, the two announcements — 353 jobs across two unrelated industries, hitting within weeks of each other — land on top of a July unemployment rate already at its annual peak. Offsetting signals exist: Northrop Grumman locked in a three-billion-dollar Department of Defense agreement, General Atomics received a twenty-million-dollar California Competes tax credit tied to fusion energy expansion, Khartis Therapeutics closed a fifty-million-dollar Series B, and Japan's Craif established a thirty-three-million-dollar San Diego R&D fund focused on pancreatic cancer diagnostics. UC San Diego also anchors an eighteen-million-dollar NSF quantum materials research center within a six-center, hundred-and-eight-million-dollar national initiative.
The tension the region faces is between sustained capital formation in defense and life sciences on one hand, and employment-level signals pointing in the opposite direction on the other — with August labor figures not due for roughly six weeks.