County Posts Slight Drop in Jobless Rate for September : Unemployment: It improves to 6.5% from August’s 6.7%. The gain, however, is attributed to seasonal hiring in schools.

Orange County employers added 5,200 full- and part-time jobs to their payrolls in September, but the entire gain came from seasonal hiring by school districts as teachers returned to the classroom after summer vacation.

Other key job categories, including manufacturing and retailing, remained virtually unchanged, and the construction and services industries each dropped 700 jobs for the month, the state Employment Development Department reported Friday.

In a separate report Friday, the EDD said Orange County’s September unemployment rate barely budged, dropping a statistically insignificant two-tenths of a point to 6.5% from August’s 6.7%. The unemployment rate in the county in September, 1991, was 4.7%.

The report estimated that 88,300 Orange County residents were without jobs in September, up from 65,500 a year earlier, but 4,300 fewer than the tally of 92,600 unemployed in August.

The jobless-rate report estimates the number of unemployed county residents, regardless of where they previously worked. The wage and salary employment tally, by contrast, measures the number of jobs located within the county.

The September wage and salary report shows a 3% decline in the number of jobs in the county since September, 1991. That dip is in keeping with economists’ predictions that employment losses will continue to plague the local economy through mid-1993.

“The numbers seem to be continuing the trends we’ve been seeing,” said David Brownstone, an economist at UC Irvine.

While September’s local payrolls were bigger than August’s, the 1,128,800 jobs provided by Orange County employers last month were 30,800 below the September, 1991, total and were down 76,800 from September, 1990.

A strengthening economy in the second half of 1993, however, is expected to result in a flurry of new jobs that could add as many as 12,000 positions to depleted local payrolls through the end of next year, said Anil Puri, dean of the economics department at Cal State Fullerton.

Orange County’s September unemployment rate remained the lowest in Southern California and was the fourth lowest among the state’s urbanized counties.

The statewide jobless rate for September was 9.2%, down from 9.5% in August but a hefty increase from 7.5% in September, 1991.

Nationally, September’s jobless rate of 7.2% represented a slight drop from 7.3% in August, but was up from 6.4% a year earlier.