County’s Jobless Rate Hits 8.8% : Employment: The figure for July is a seven-year high. About 4,000 positions were lost in agriculture.

Ventura County’s employment picture remained gloomy in July as the jobless rate increased to 8.8%, the highest rate in seven years, state employment officials said Friday.

And while officials attribute the increase partly to a sharp rise in the number of people looking for work, they said the figures also reflect a continuing erosion in the number of jobs available in the county.

July’s unemployment rate followed an 8.6% jobless rate in June, according to the monthly report released by the state Employment Development Department. A year ago, July unemployment in the county stood at 7.3%.

Despite the rise in the jobless rate, job-seekers in Ventura County are marginally better off than elsewhere in California, according to the report. California’s unemployment rate in July was 9.3%, down slightly from June’s 9.5% rate.

Unemployment in the United States declined to 7.6% in July, down from 7.8% the previous month.

Across the county, there were 5,700 fewer jobs available in July than in the previous month, with 4,100 of the jobs lost in the highly seasonal agricultural industry.

“We had a large number of agricultural workers come in during June and July as the season ended for strawberries, flowers and row crops, including chili peppers and lettuce,” said Aveline Villalobos, who manages the state’s unemployment office in Oxnard.

While the Oxnard office typically serves up to 500 unemployed people a day, 1,400 people flooded the office on a single day as the growing season came to an end, she said.

Of the 1,600 other jobs that were lost in July, 400 were in food processing and another 300 were in the manufacturing of durable goods, officials said.

Including all job categories except self-employment, there were 243,200 jobs in the county in July.

The job losses were more pronounced over the last 12 months than the one-month period, with a loss of 8,500 positions in Ventura County, officials said. July figures represented the 17th straight month of year-over-year job losses in the county, according to Bruce De Vine, chief economist for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

The persistent decline suggests that the worst is yet to come, De Vine said. “You have to stop losing jobs before you start seeing a gain in jobs,” he said.

De Vine pointed to a probable loss of jobs in local government following the adoption of a state budget as an indicator of a continuing weakness in the job market. Up to now, local government has been one of the few sectors showing job gains, he noted.

Despite the loss of jobs in the county during July, both the labor force and number of employed showed increases. The reason for the apparent contradiction was the large number of east county residents who found work in Los Angeles County, said Larry Kennedy, who manages the state unemployment office in Simi Valley.

But jobs were still tough to come by inside the county, Kennedy said. While initial claims for unemployment have declined since January, requests for extensions by those who have exhausted their first six months of coverage have increased, he said.

“Those who’ve been unemployed for a while are not going back to work” quickly, Kennedy said.

In recent months, members of the morale-boosting Jobs Club in the Simi Valley office have grown somewhat more pessimistic, said Madeleine Brockwell, the club’s coordinator.

“People don’t feel things are going to be moving until after the fall election,” Brockwell said.

The reason for their pessimism is well-founded, said Villalobos of the Oxnard office, where a shortage of job listings has existed for the past two years. “The listings dropped off over two years ago and we’ve never seen it climb back up,” Villalobos said.