MARY E. NELSON, Manager, Santa Ana office, state Employment Development Department

On a recent Monday afternoon, the parking lot at the job service office in Santa Ana is nearly full with cars of every description-- from old rusty junkers to shiny new Volvos. The cars are a reminder that while a recession hurts the poor most, hard times can reach out and strike nearly anyone. The manager is Mary E. Nelson, who--with nearly 30 years in state government--has seen recessions come and go. This one, however, could turn out to be worse than the last, she tells Times staff writer Michael Flagg in a recent conversation.

Unemployment in Orange County went down from a seven-year high of 5.7% in July to 4.7% in August, the latest month available. The $64 question, obviously, is: Have you noticed an improvement in the local economy?

I’m not noticing any improvement at all. The jobs we’re filling for the most part are still in the service industry; they’re comparatively low-paying jobs. A lot of our job openings are in medical industries, some clerical. But a lot of them are hotels--and even they’re down now because it’s between the seasons for them--and restaurants, sales. And we’re still having a lot of employers leaving the county.

Where are these decamping employers going to?

Some of them are leaving the country altogether because they’re in a business where they can’t compete with overseas manufacturers, lots of times because of a combination of things including our regulations on air pollution. So if the same product can be made in Mexico or the Far East, they’re leaving. Wages are a lot of it, too.

The county has some highly skilled, high-paid blue-collar workers and a lot of low-paying sweatshop jobs. Which is being hurt most in this recession?

It’s both. But the really amazing thing is that we’ve never seen as many white-collar people as we’re seeing now. In the last recession, aerospace got it for sure--a lot of those people were out of work. But other industries didn’t do too badly. Right now, though, even trying to find something else to train for, something where you might possibly get a job, is a problem for these people. On the other hand, for assembly-line workers, there are at least some other jobs they can train for. And while their new jobs may pay less, it’s still not going to be quite as big a change in their paychecks and their standard of living as for some of the white-collar people.

What happens to these white-collar people?

The higher the salary, the longer it’s going to take you to find a job even under the best of circumstances. For those people, reality sets in about halfway through the 26 weeks of their unemployment claim, and you can only make one claim a year, and very naturally they get a little panicky. We have 385 jobless people in our Professional Employment Network in this office; they’re averaging about 40 people a month getting some kind of permanent job, although it may not be what they want. About 10 a month are getting a part-time job.

Are there any other differences between this recession and the last one?

I used to think the last one was worse than this one, but I’m not so sure any more. It seems as though you could see signs the last time around that the economy was starting to recover, but I don’t see those signs now. One of the hardest things the staff does is seeing what’s going on out there. And it’s still bad. A lot of times when a grocery chain is getting ready to open a big store, they want us out there to help; we do preliminary screening for them. One of my staff came back the other day and said that many of the people standing in line she could tell had never worked for a market before. You could tell by the way they were dressed. The weather was awful and the wind was blowing and there were maybe 300 people she saw in two days, and nobody was leaving that line.

One problem is that these service jobs don’t pay much, do they?

They’re close to minimum wage, though some of them pay better, say $6 to $10 an hour. We have job orders for everything from $4.25, the minimum in California, up to $15 to $18 an hour. But most of them, you can be sure, aren’t for $18 an hour. Most of them are $6 or $7.

I see from your reports that even retailing, which is usually pretty strong this time of year, is down in recent months.

Yes, we’re seeing chain stores that opened in the last year or two already closing. Especially restaurants. People who used to eat in restaurants a lot just aren’t. We’ve always been a two-wage earner county because it’s so expensive to live here. If even one of those two wage earners is laid off, that puts a significant dent in the family finances. If you’re struggling to hold on to your house, you’re not going to be eating out a lot.

There are 65,000 unemployed people in the county. How many of them have run through their benefits for this year?

It’s really hard to tell. There’s no good handle on it. But there have to be thousands. Our most popular question here is when there is going to be an extension of benefits. That’s followed by “What am I going to eat?” And “Where do I go now?” The staff gets upset because they get people who break down and cry.

Where do these people go?

Usually after unemployment the next step is welfare. It’s not news that the professional people who are working out of our back room here trying to find work have lost everything but their cars. And some have lost those, and some are living in them. These are people you don’t ordinarily think of as homeless.

So what’s ahead?

Most people believe we’re going to a service economy, and I don’t think it’s going to accommodate everyone who’s jobless now. A lot of the jobs in factories and plants aren’t very kind to the environment and aren’t economically feasible in this country. So the question is: Where do you put these people?

On the blue-collar unemployed. . . .

“A lot of the people we’re seeing when places close speak only Spanish. It’s very difficult for them to find a new job, even if they’ve worked for the company a lot of years and have a good work record.”

On the white-collar unemployed. . . .

“The people most likely to get a job are in electronics or in sales; those having a really rough time are coming out of banking and aerospace.”

On the recession and wages. . . .

“There are a lot of minimum-wage jobs in the county, particularly now when employers feel they shouldn’t have to pay--or they can’t afford to pay--very much. And they pay as little as possible.”

On extending jobless benefits past 26 weeks. . . .

“That’s a short-term solution, and it puts off the day of having to do something else. What worries me is what we’re going to do with all those people whose jobs are no longer here.”