County’s Jobless Rate Again Drops Below 3%

Orange County’s run of extremely low unemployment continued unabated in November, with the jobless rate dipping to 2.9% from October’s 3%.

In California, only two other counties, both posh residential suburbs of San Francisco, posted lower rates: San Mateo County with 2.6% and Marin County with 2.8%.

November was the 22nd straight month of sub-4% unemployment in Orange County. Most economists consider anything below 4% to represent virtually full employment. A true zero rate is almost impossible to achieve, they say, because there is always a certain number of people between jobs.

Slight Drop Was Expected

An estimated 1,370,000 Orange County residents held jobs in November, the state Employment Development Department reported. The EDD said that 40,300 eligible workers were jobless for the month. The official unemployment count doesn’t include so-called hard-core unemployed who have given up looking for work or have exhausted state and federal jobless benefits.

The slight drop from October’s unemployment rate in Orange County was expected, EDD analysts said, because retail stores begin their huge annual Christmas season hiring campaigns in November.

In fact, most of the increase in jobs for the month was attributed to retail hiring, according to figures prepared by EDD analyst Daniel Johnson. He estimated that the total number of jobs in the county last month was up by 5,900 from October, with retail hiring accounting for 4,800 new positions. State and local government hiring, especially in school systems, accounted for the rest of the increase.

The county’s November figure was the lowest since the 2.5% rate reported for December, 1987, and was the fourth time in the past year that the rate has hit 2.9%. Other months with 2.9% unemployment rates were January, March and April of this year. January, 1987, was the last time the county’s rate exceeded 4%.

The national jobless rate for November was 5.4%, up from 5.3% in October, while the statewide rate was 5.1%, up from 5%.

None of the surrounding Southern California counties had unemployment rates that approached Orange County’s. The next lowest was 4.1% in San Diego, followed by Los Angeles with 4.4%, San Bernardino with 4.6% and Riverside with 6.6%.

Further Decline Likely

December’s jobless rate, which will be released in late January, is expected to fall below November’s 2.9% because of seasonal retail hiring, the EDD said. Although Orange County’s unemployment rate is unusually low, there are areas of the nation where joblessness is almost unknown: generally sparsely populated rural ranching communities where almost every able-bodied resident is self-employed.

The prime example in recent years has been McPherson County in Nebraska, which maintained a 0% jobless rate from January, 1987, through July, 1988. But an analyst at the Nebraska Department of Labor said that was largely because the federal job tallying computer system cannot handle the small numbers generated by such thinly populated areas. The county has only one town and a total population of about 590. Since July, the Nebraska Department of Labor has been manually tallying employment in the smaller rural counties and has boosted McPherson’s unemployment rate to 2.5% for November.

In Banner County, Neb., however, only 3 of the 400 people in the civilian labor force were out of work last month, for an unemployment rate of 0.7%.

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN ORANGE COUNTY January 1987: 4.1% November 1988: 2.9% Source: California Employment development Department