Lower Jobless Rate Misleading, Officials Say

Ventura County’s jobless rate dipped to 7.6% in October, but state officials said Tuesday that the seeming improvement reflects a large number of discouraged job seekers who were not included in the figures.

The state Employment Development Department reported the number of employed county residents as unchanged from a month earlier, although the number of people officially out of work fell by 1,100.

Many of the long-term unemployed began filing for extended benefits last week. More than 1,500 county residents who exhausted their 26 weeks of benefits have filed for the 13-week extensions approved by President Bush under pressure from Congress.

“We’ve had 300 people a month over the last nine months who exhausted benefits without finding work,” said Larry Kennedy, manager of the state unemployment office in Simi Valley, which fielded 700 extension filings last week. “The types of jobs we’ve lost in this area--in manufacturing, middle management and professional fields--are not the kind that rebound quickly.”

Take Susan Hunt, 36, of Port Hueneme, who sought an extension of her bygone $190-weekly benefits Tuesday at another state office in south Oxnard. Hunt has searched futilely for work since last December, when she lost her bank teller’s job in Huntington Beach with her husband’s transfer to the U. S. Naval Construction Battalion Center in Port Hueneme.

“We’ve been living from one of his paychecks to the next,” said Hunt, a mother of three. “We’re eating a lot of ground turkey and cutting a lot of coupons.”

Roberto Melendez sought job leads Tuesday at the same office. Two weeks ago, he lost his $8-an-hour job with a Camarillo air-conditioning firm that laid off 30 of 45 shop workers.

A month before his layoff, his wife delivered the couple’s first child, which was stillborn.

“I suddenly have a lot of problems this year,” said the 26-year-old Port Hueneme man, who had the job with the air-conditioning firm for nearly four years. “I’ve gone to the Edison Co., to electronics companies in Camarillo and to temporary agencies. No one has work for me.”

State employment officials said the outlook for the county’s economy remains anemic, especially since retail hiring has been slow for this holiday season.

The monthly report shows 341,800 Ventura County residents were employed last month and 28,000 were unemployed.

The October rate, which dipped from 7.8% a month earlier, was higher than both the state’s 7.3% rate and the 6.4% U. S. unemployment rate.

Last month’s rate was well above the county’s 5.8% jobless rate in October, 1990--four months into the nation’s recession.

State officials said the monthly unemployment survey generally includes the long-term unemployed, people who are denied unemployment benefits and 16-year-olds who enter the job market but cannot find work. But Linda Reed, the department’s statistician for Ventura County, acknowledged that the October report did not fully reflect the number of long-term unemployed.

Critics have long said the federal reporting guidelines understate the degree of joblessness. They suggest that a truer reading would be to add 50% to the official number of people out of work, which then would include thousands of uncounted discouraged workers, people working less than full-time not by choice and those working in jobs far below their qualifications.

“The unemployment figures don’t account for someone who has a master’s degree in public administration selling shoes in a mall,” said Phil Bohan, contracts manager for the Job Training Policy Council of Ventura County, a federally funded agency that trains economically disadvantaged and displaced workers.

“They’re using sound statistical techniques,” Bohan said of the federal government. “But it becomes a problem when the report suggests the economy is improving, when all we have is a decrease in the number of people being counted.”