County Jobless Rate Down to 3% for November, but Rise in ’88 Expected

Orange County’s unemployment rate dropped to 3% in November, just the second time in 10 years it has been so low.

The unemployment rate first hit 3% in April but had risen slightly since then to reach 3.3% in October.

The county rate usually drops slightly each November, as merchants begin hiring extra help for the Christmas season. In November, 1986, the rate was 3.9%.

Despite the good news, 40,000 county residents were unemployed during November, the state Employment Development Department said Thursday.

And the department said the rate will begin to rise in 1988 after dropping for each of the last five years.

4% in ’87

Unemployment has dropped because the local economy has created a lot of new jobs, gradually pushing unemployment down into the low 3% range for most of 1987 from an average 4% in 1986.

The year before, new jobs had grown a strong 5%, and in 1986 they grew 4%.

For 1987, however, new jobs are expected to grow by just 3.6% when all the figures are in, according to a forecast by the Center for Economic Research at Chapman College. And in 1988 the rate will slow still further to about 2.5%, the center says.

The state and national economies are also projected by economists to slow in 1988 even more than the county forecast. Earlier this week, the federal government said its index of leading economic indicators had its sharpest drop in six years in November.

Eventually the local slowdown in new jobs will cause unemployment to rise, says the state employment department, which has forecast an Orange County unemployment rate of 4.6% for 1988.

Low unemployment has brought its own problems for employers. While the unemployment rate remains so low there will continue to be acute shortages of some types of workers in the county, particularly in low-paying jobs, said James L. Doti, dean of the School of Business and Management at Chapman College.

“The tight labor market will continue to plague the county’s economy,” he said.

The national unemployment rate of 5.8% in November was a 10-year low. The California unemployment rate for the month was 5.3%, the lowest in the last two decades. The national and state unemployment rates, which were reported in early December, are seasonally adjusted to filter out normal changes in employment that occur each year.

The number of employed in the county in November was estimated at 1.29 million by the state employment department, up 60,000 jobs from a year ago.