L.A.’s Jobless Rate Drops as Nation’s Holds Steady at 7.3%

The unemployment rate remained at 7.3% in March, the government said today, as the creation of 430,000 new jobs just accommodated the number of Americans entering the labor force in search of work.

About 8.4 million people were still without work, while the number at work set yet another record at 107.1 million, the Labor Department reported.

(In Los Angeles, the March unemployment rate was 6.5%, down 0.2% from February and considerably below the 7.9% of a year ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. For all of California, the jobless rate rose 0.2% to 6.9% last month. February’s 6.7% rate was the lowest jobless mark in the state in nearly four years.)

As has been the case in recent months, the bulk of the job gains nationwide were in service industries, not in manufacturing.

One of the biggest gains came in retail trade, which logged 80,000 new jobs last month. Manufacturing employment, on the other hand, has shown no growth since August.

Commenting on the new report, Janet L. Norwood, commissioner of labor statistics, noted that adult women--traditionally heavily employed in the service field--benefited more than any other single group from the new jobs.

She said adult women have filled more than half the jobs created in the last 12 months.

Civilian joblessness has been moving in the narrow range of 7.1% to 7.5% for nearly a year, since last May. Analysts predict that unemployment will drop to 7% or even lower this summer, and then edge upward.

The rate, which hit a peak of 10.7% in November, 1982, dropped to 7.2% last June and then headed upward before falling to 7.1% in November, the low point since the 1981-82 recession.

When unemployment reached that post-Depression peak, about 11.9 million Americans were out of work.

In the 28 months of recovery through March, the number of jobless people has been cut by 3.5 million and the jobless rate has declined 3.4%.

The Labor Department also reported today that 1.3 million people were counted as “discouraged workers”--those who have given up searching for a job--in the first three months of the year. Such people are not counted in the labor force and do not play a part in the unemployment rate calculation.

The number of discouraged workers has fallen just 100,000 in the last year.

Among specific groups, today’s report showed these unemployment rates for March: Adult men, 6.2%, down from 6.3%; adult women, unchanged at 6.7%; teen-agers, 18.2%, down 0.2%; whites, unchanged at 6.2%; blacks, 15.2%, down from 16.3%, and Latinos, 10.2%, up from 9.7%.

The unemployment rate is not expected to improve significantly, as most economists project that economic growth--and corresponding job creation--will be relatively modest this year.

A rule of thumb among economists is that when the gross national product grows at a 3% annual rate, the unemployment rate remains stable. Most analysts are predicting 4% growth this year.