Jobless Rate Rises but Experts Insist Recession Is Over : Economy: 7% were unemployed in June, Labor Dept. says. It’s the highest level since 1986. The White House seeks to deflect criticism.

The nation’s unemployment rate edged up slightly in June, the government reported Friday, but economists said the increase was too small to reverse their conclusion that the year-old recession has come to an end.

The Labor Department’s monthly report put the jobless rate last month at 7%--up just one-tenth of a percentage point from the previous month. At the same time, the number of jobs in the economy shrank a bit, dropping by 50,000 from their revised May levels.

The jobless increase is not important in economic terms, but it is significant politically. Although most analysts believe that the national economy is beginning a recovery, the June jobless rate was the highest since October, 1986.

In California, the unemployment rate leaped to 8.2% in June--up half a percentage point from the previous month. The state figures are more volatile because the sample on which they are based is far smaller than the federal sample.

The White House sought to deflect criticism about the slight rise in the national unemployment rate.

Michael J. Boskin, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters that “we certainly are not satisfied” with the increase, but he insisted that, despite the new figures, the recession had ended.

“We would like to see people have an understanding that this turnaround is coming,” Boskin said. “We believe the recovery has begun.” He predicted that the jobless rate “will begin to start back down later in the year.”

Janet L. Norwood, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was more cautious, but she also contended that the June rise did not change the consensus that the downturn has ended.

“The June data point to a labor market that has stopped deteriorating,” Norwood said in testimony prepared for the congressional Joint Economic Committee. She said that the cutback in jobs has essentially ended and the length of the average workweek has continued to grow.

Private economists were similarly cautious. Rod Swanson, vice president and senior economist at First Interstate Bancorp in Los Angeles, said the statistics suggested that any upturn would be a weak one.

“It’s not going be a gangbusters recovery,” Swanson said. “The recovery is not going to be a uniform march out of recession. Even if a recovery is underway, unemployment can continue to rise for a while.”

Gary Burtless, a Brookings Institution economist, offered a similar view. “Employment is stabilizing,” he said. “The losses this month offset the gains of last month.”

The Labor Department said also that it had increased its estimate of the number of new jobs reported in May. It said the economy had created about 119,000 new jobs in May, rather than 59,000, as estimated in preliminary figures.

The June figures brought the number of people out of work to 8.7 million--virtually unchanged from the 8.6 million recorded the previous month. Unemployment rates for the major categories of workers were essentially the same as in May.

Separately, the Labor Department reported that the number of new claims for unemployment insurance declined by 8,000 during the week that ended June 22, adding to suggestions that the economy is creating new jobs.

“This means firms have not been engaging in massive layoffs,” Brookings’ Burtless said. The bulk of the job loss reported in June was in the manufacturing sector. Factory payrolls shrank by 60,000 over the month, the Labor Department reported.

But the patterns were uneven. The number of jobs in the health and business services industries rose by 40,000 during June, the department said. And job levels in construction, retail trade and other service sectors remained unchanged.

The decline in the number of new payroll jobs was only one measure of the employment situation that the department reported Friday. By another sampling, using a survey of private households, the number of jobs nationwide fell by 50,000.

At the same time, the department reported that the length of the average workweek for rank-and-file production workers--another barometer of economic activity--rose by two-tenths of an hour in June to 34.5 hours.