Bay Area business groups may merge as “doom loop” jolts wobbly region

SAN JOSE — Two Bay Area business groups are eyeing a merger at a time when the economy has begun to wobble and the job market has started to falter.

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

It wasn’t immediately clear whether one group of the other would be the dominant partner in any combination of the organizations.

The chief executive officers of the Bay Area Council and Silicon Valley Leadership Group have begun discussions regarding how such a combination would occur and what shape it might take.

Both groups have been active on an array of issues that are of interest to just about every type of business in the Bay Area.

The advocacy of the two organizations has included the promotion of economic development, infrastructure modernization, housing, education and healthcare.

The potential formal alliance of the organizations arrives with the backdrop a big slump in the pace of job gains in the Bay Area as well as outright job losses for the region’s all-important tech industry.

To be sure, the Bay Area gained 62,100 jobs in 2023 — but that was far fewer than the 270,900 jobs the nine-county region gained in 2021, according to seasonally adjusted figures released by the state Employment Development Department.

Even worse, the 2023 job gains in the Bay Area were also less than half the 127,200 jobs that the region added in 2022, the EDD report shows.

The tech industry in the Bay Area has begun to struggle, according to official employment statistics that go well beyond the steady stream of headlines about layoffs in the vital sector.

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