June Unemployment Rate Jumps 1% : Economy: Business leaders blame the lingering recession for the relatively sharp increase to 7.2% from 6.2% in May.

The jobless rate in Ventura County jumped a full percentage point in June, confirming what many of the county’s business leaders and officials have been saying: The recession has turned out to be more stubborn than expected.

The June report showed that 7.2% of the county’s workers were unemployed, the state employment department reported Monday. That compares with 6.2% in May and 4.8% in June, 1990.

The relatively sharp increase came as a disappointment to officials and others who had seen the rate decline during the spring after reaching a 12-month high of 7.6% in January.

In human terms, the statistics mean that 26,400 people were looking for jobs in Ventura County last month--3,900 more than the previous month and 8,100 more than in June, 1990.

“Actually, there may be more people seeking work than the figures indicate,” said Larry Kennedy, manager of the state’s Simi Valley employment office. “As a recession grows older, a lot of people are no longer counted as unemployed because they’ve become discouraged and stopped looking.”

At Kennedy’s office, which serves an area that has been hit hard by layoffs in aerospace and other defense-related industries, 1,701 people filed new unemployment insurance claims in June--up 7.9% from 1,576 new filings in May and up 32.2% from 1,286 in June, 1990.

Kennedy noted, however, that more Ventura County residents were working last month than during May. Civilian employment in the county totaled 342,600 in June, a slight increase over 340,000 in May but a sizable decline from 361,100 in June, 1990.

Linda Reed, a state labor market analyst, said the jobless rate in the county increased markedly although more people were at work because an unusually large number of students entered the summer job market.

Avelina Villalobos, manager of the Employment Development Department’s North Oxnard office, said about 3,000 farm workers are unemployed in her area.

“They’ll probably be called back for two or three weeks to plant strawberries in October,” she said. After that, the workers will be unemployed again until the next strawberry harvest in late January or early February, she said.

“In this area, we’re blessed with a very good mix of government, agricultural and small-business employers. Unfortunately, though, we don’t have a lot of new industry coming in.”

Dana Weber Young, president of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn., said that while there have been no major layoffs in recent months, the county has lost more than 5,000 manufacturing jobs since October, 1990.

“These jobs are badly missed because they tend to be better paid than service-industry jobs such as in hotels and restaurants,” she said.

Five or six months ago, Young said, “most people I talked to said they felt the recession had bottomed out. Now, they’re much more pessimistic, especially in view of the downturn in aerospace and auto manufacturing.”

And William E. McAleer, president of Ventura County National Bank, said that although he feels that the county’s economy has bottomed out, “I expect things to continue pretty flat well into next year.

“We’re fortunate in this county to have the security of an unusually large government payroll--about 23% of the work force,” McAleer said. “On the other hand, I’m not looking for any great news until at least the spring of 1992.”