O.C. Jobless Rate Rises to an 8-Year High : Employment: April’s 5.7% figure translates to 76,800 people seeking jobs in the county. It is the worst percentage since the 5.9% reported for January, 1984.
Orange County’s jobless rate rose to 5.7% in April, the highest level in more than eight years, as the recession continued wreaking havoc on Southland construction, manufacturing and retailing employment.
Since the economic downturn began in July, 1990, county businesses have lopped nearly 65,000 jobs from their payrolls as they struggle to cope with sagging sales and plunging profits.
The April unemployment rate, representing 76,800 job-seekers who live in the county, is the county’s highest monthly rate since the 5.9% reported for January, 1984.
In April, 1991, by contrast, state employment analysts reported a 4.6% jobless rate for Orange County, representing 61,200 jobless workers.
The growing joblessness is not unexpected. Eleanor Jordan, the state Employment Development Department’s local labor market analyst, and economists from UC Irvine, Chapman University, Cal State Fullerton and various banks have been saying for months that they expect the county’s jobless rate to climb through midsummer as business continues adjusting to the slump.
Those specialists have also said they expect county businesses to continue cutting payrolls through the summer before a slight uptick in hiring evens things out for the year.
The number of jobs in the county reflects the relative health of the local economy, while the county unemployment rate illustrates broader regional conditions.
The difference is that the jobless rate reflects the percentage of county residents considered eligible for work who have lost jobs that could have been located anywhere in the Los Angeles basin, while the job tally counts only jobs at businesses located in Orange County, regardless of where the workers live.
That job tally shows there were 1,133,600 full- and part-time non-agricultural jobs in the county in April, down from 1,161,000 a year earlier, for a 2.4% decline.
Job losses at local businesses since the recession, which began 21 months earlier, represent a 5.4% decline--far more severe than the 2.9% decline posted at the 21-month mark of the 1981-83 recession.
Yet in the decade-ago downturn, unemployment rates averaged more than 7% a month and hit a high of 9.4% in January, 1983.
The reason for the apparent disparity--fewer job cuts but higher unemployment rates--is that the county’s population was growing much faster a decade ago than now, which permitted both the number of jobs and the number of jobless to increase.
County job losses in the current recession have hit hardest in retailing, down 25,400 jobs since July, 1990, to a total in April of 193,400; manufacturing, off 23,500 in the same period to a total of 227,100, and construction, which has dropped 15,100 jobs in the 21-month period to an April total of 50,900.
Construction employment, however, has picked up in the past two months, gaining 1,000 jobs from March to April after a 5,400-job gain from February to March, as builders continued recovering from the winter rains. Despite the recent gains, construction industry insiders say it will be about a year before any significant level of new building activity is achieved.
Despite the grim declines of the past 21 months, the news on Orange County employment is not all bleak. The county still has one of the lowest jobless rates in the state and the lowest in the Southland, where other counties’ April rates ranged from 6.8% in San Diego to 11.7% in Riverside.
And the number of jobs at businesses within Orange County actually rose by 3,200 from March to April, 1992, with the slight construction rebound and a big jump in local agricultural hiring, as farmers geared up for the spring strawberry harvest.
Employment in service industries also grew in April, up 1,700 jobs from March--offset by a loss of 1,400 jobs in manufacturing.
Tale of Two Recessions
Since the recession began nearly two years ago, 64,700 jobs have been cut from county payrolls; however, during the first four months of this year, job losses have flattened.
Unemployment in Orange County
The county’s unemployment rate of 5.7% in April is the highest in eight years. But the rate is much less severe than during the last recession, when up to 9.4% of the county work force was out of work.
April 1982: 6.1%
Jan., 1983: 9.45%
April, 1984: 4.6%
April, 1990: 3.0%
April, 1992: 5.7%
Source: State Employment Development Department
