Joblessness Rises After 3-Month Fall : Rate Climbs to 7% as 38,000 Lose Work at Factories in Sept.
About 38,000 manufacturing workers lost their jobs in September as unemployment jumped back up to 7%, dashing a faint glimmer of optimism that industrial America might finally be pulling out of its long recession. The 0.2-percentage-point rise ended three months of falling unemployment.
In all sectors, the Labor Department said today, employment fell by 264,000 jobs.
The largest jobless increase came among men aged 20-24, rising from 10.3% in August to 12% last month.
But California bucked the national trend in September, registering a 0.2% jobless dip to 6.4%. The number of unemployed was down to 860,000, contrasted with 883,000 in August.
Today’s report amounted to fresh evidence that the long-awaited turnaround in the lagging manufacturing sector has not yet arrived. Indeed, analyst Allen Sinai commented, “we’re still left asking the question: Has manufacturing bottomed out?”
Gain of Just 1,000
The department had reported that manufacturing employment rose by 19,000 jobs in August, but today revised that calculation to a gain of just 1,000.
Noting that revision, James Cochrane, the chief economist with Texas Commerce Bancshares, said, “The August increase proved to be an illusion.”
He noted that about 2 million factory jobs have disappeared since 1979 and commented, “There’s a trend that’s still with us--and it’s a dangerous trend for any industrialized country.”
White House spokesman Larry Speakes, however, said, “We see no reason to expect a rising trend in unemployment.”
September’s loss of 38,000 factory jobs amounted to a resumption of the downward trend in manufacturing that held through the first half of 1986. So far this year, the nation has lost about 200,000 factory jobs.
40% of Jobs Regained
In fact, the overall economy has regained only about 40% of the manufacturing employment lost during the 1981-82 recession.
Employment in the troubled oil and gas industry fell 5,000 last month, bringing to 135,000 those losses this year.
That means that, since Jan. 1, 25% of all oil and gas workers have lost their jobs. Moreover, noted the commissioner of labor statistics, Janet L. Norwood, “since the March, 1982, peak employment level (when oil prices topped $30 a barrel), the oil and gas extraction industry has lost nearly half of its jobs.”
Normally, employment drops sharply in September with the beginning of a new school year; the department’s seasonal-adjustment process is designed to remove the effect of such predictable occurrences.
This year, however, fewer women re-entered the labor force, and the seasonal adjustment may have overstated the September job losses.
Labor Force Up 57,000
Indeed, the department’s survey of 250,000 business payrolls showed an overall increase of 107,000 people in non-farm jobs.
