Bay Area business groups may merge as ‘loop of doom’ shakes region

Downtown San Jose, March 2024.

SAN JOSE — Two Bay Area business groups are considering merging as the economy becomes unstable and the job market begins to falter.

Silicon Valley Leadership Group and the Bay Area Council announced Tuesday that they have begun discussions to create a single organization to represent business interests in the nine-county region.

It was not immediately clear whether one group would be the dominant partner of the other in the organizational combination.

The chief executives of the Bay Area Council and Silicon Valley Leadership Group have begun discussions about how such a combination could occur and what form it would take.

Both groups have actively worked on a variety of issues of interest to nearly every type of business in the Bay Area.

The two organizations’ advocacy includes promoting economic development, infrastructure modernization, housing, education, and health care.

The possibility of a formal partnership between the two organizations comes amid a significant slowdown in job growth in the Bay Area and a complete loss of jobs in the region’s most important technology industries.

True, the Bay Area gained 62,100 jobs in 2023, but the nine-county region gained 270,900 jobs in 2021, according to seasonally adjusted numbers released by the state Employment Development Department. It was much less than that.

To make matters worse, job growth in the Bay Area in 2023 was less than half of the 127,200 jobs the region added in 2022, the EDD report shows.

The Bay Area’s tech industry is starting to struggle, according to official employment figures, and it goes beyond the constant headlines about layoffs in key sectors.

Bay Area tech companies shed a net 14,600 jobs in 2023, according to Beacon Economics’ assessment of the EDD’s seasonally adjusted numbers.