Things Are Tough All Over : While the U.S. Jobless Rate Dips a Bit, the Improvement Is Not Evenly Spread Out
The Labor Department reported Friday that the nation’s unemployment rate dipped slightly to 7.7% in July. Although the jobless data indicates a slight improvement in the sluggish economy, the recovery is uneven throughout the country.
To assess the strength of the job market in various regions, Times staff writers spoke with economists, government officials, company officials and the unemployed workers. Here’s what they found:
West
Jim Wilson of Redondo Beach has been out of work for nine months since being laid off from a management job at Fletcher Oil Co., based in Carson. After eight months of networking and sending out resumes, he paid $450 to join Forty Plus, a nonprofit organization that helps out-of-work executives.
“For white-collar professionals,” Wilson says, “it’s more like a depression than a recession.”
He is among the unfortunate in California counted among the state’s 1.3 million unemployed. Even though the state’s unemployment rate dropped to 8.9% in July from 9.5% in June, it is still among the nation’s highest.
In fact, tough times in key California industries such as defense are starting to have a “spillover effect” in other Western states, says Brian A. Cromwell, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
“It had been the case . . . that the weakness was centered in California,” Cromwell says. “But now we’re seeing weakness in other states.”
A Fed analysis shows that Western states’ “payroll employment,” a measure of the number of jobs that companies have on their payrolls, has been declining in recent months. The key exception, Cromwell says, is Utah, where jobs have increased by 2.4% in the last year on the strength of growth in construction and non-defense manufacturing.
On balance, however, the West is still doing “a lot better than the East Coast” in terms of jobs, says Tracy Clark, an economist with the Economic Outlook Center at Arizona State University in Tempe. “(But) we’re in a fairly slow-growth mode,” Clark says, “and that will probably be more or less the case till the end of the year.”
William Seitchik, a San Francisco-based executive recruiter with clients in the apparel industry, says companies have put most new divisions and expansions on hold. Such expansions had been a key source of new jobs in retailing before the recession. Nike, the Beaverton, Ore., athletic shoe and apparel company that is rapidly expanding its retailing operation, is one of a few companies bucking the trend.
“(Most) companies are concentrating on their core businesses and are not looking to expand on the fringes,” says Seitchik, vice president of Seitchik Corwin & Seitchik. However, he is encouraged by a noticeable pickup in hiring in the last three months. West Coast companies, he added, have been more aggressive than their East Coast counterparts in staffing sales showrooms.
But there’s a discouraging sign in California: Unemployed residents are spending more time looking for jobs than a year ago, according to the state Employment Development Department. As of July, 1991, the average length of unemployment was 13.1 weeks. Last month, it was 17.4 weeks.
