O.C. Closed 1991 With 4.4% Jobless Rate : * Employment: Officials say 12,000 jobs were cut last year. The county’s December unemployment rate contrasts with the 4.1% figure during the same month in 1990.

More than 12,000 jobs were slashed from Orange County employers’ payrolls in 1991, and the recession-plagued year ended with an estimated 61,000 county residents on the unemployment rolls.

The year closed with a 4.4% jobless rate for December--unchanged from November and up from the 4.1% unemployment rate in December, 1990, according to figures released Friday by the state Employment Development Department.

Those figures look good when compared to a national December jobless rate of 7.1% and a statewide rate of 7.7%.

But the annual average of 4.8% unemployment in Orange County was the highest since 1983, when an estimated 7.1% of the eligible workers in the county lost their jobs.

And the state EDD doesn’t count the underemployed--people working at much lower paying, less-skilled jobs than they once held--or the long-term jobless person who has been out of work long enough to have used up all unemployment benefits.

Economist Esmael Adibi said he and other forecasters at the Chapman University Center for Economic Research believe that when the jobless numbers get their annual revision in March, Orange County’s 1991 jobless rate will increase while the number of jobs in the county--now estimated at 1.213 million--will decrease.

The county’s unemployment rate tallies the number of residents who are out of work--even when their former jobs were based outside of the county. The tally of Orange County jobs is a separate study that counts positions at Orange County-based businesses without regard to the employees’ residence.

“We would expect perhaps a 5% unemployment rate and only about 1.208 million jobs” to be reported in the revised 1991 numbers, Adibi said.

The change in this revision could be dramatic because there is a newly adopted system that relies on field reports from employers rather than estimates from EDD analysts.

Federal defense spending cuts and a deepening depression in the construction industry claimed the most jobs in what was the worst year for the local economy since the recession of 1982-83.

Manufacturing employers--largely in the electronics, transportation equipment and the lumber and furniture goods segments--pared a total of 7,400 jobs from their payrolls in Orange County in 1991, and construction firms chopped an equal number of positions from their rosters during the year, according to Eleanor Jordan, EDD labor market analyst for Orange County.

But even the county’s redoubtable retail industry--which had seemed recession-proof, accounting for a big chunk of the county’s job growth over the past decade--was not able to withstand the current economic pressures.

For the first time in at least 20 years, according to EDD records, retail employment in the county shrank during 1991, with retailers shedding 3,200 positions as they struggled with the stagnant economy.

“Retail was hurt because the population in the county is older now, and consumption of goods is less important than at any time in the past few decades,” Adibi said.

In addition, this has been a recession that came after an explosive boom in housing prices, and many Orange County residents have found themselves locked into staggering monthly mortgage payments at a time when wages are not rising. The result is that people have much less disposable income than in past years--and retailers are the first to feel the pinch.

Adibi also believes that the county’s retailing industry has grown so large that it has reached a kind of critical mass and cannot grow any more unless there is a significant population boom--a boom most economists say cannot occur because of constraints on the housing supply.

As a result, Adibi said, “we expect that almost all employment segments will remain flat in Orange County in 1992, except services such as health care, education and some business-support services” which should grow as the economy begins recovering from the 19-month-old recession.