March Unemployment Rate Dips to 7.9% : County: But the rise in jobs follows a seasonal trend. Area employers report 3,800 fewer positions than a year ago.

Ventura County’s unemployment rate dropped to 7.9% in March, down from 8.5% a month before, as farm and construction workers returned to work after being idled by heavy winter rains, labor officials said Monday.

Despite the improvement, employers reported that 3,800 fewer jobs exist in Ventura County than a year ago, according to a monthly report released Monday by the state Employment Development Department.

The loss of jobs from a year ago and the continuing high number of claims for unemployment underscore the lingering economic weakness in the region, said an economist for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

While Ventura County’s job picture brightened in March, unemployment in California remained virtually unchanged, with 9.7% of the labor force out of work.

For the month of March, employment grew by 5,100 in Ventura County, with 3,500 hired in agriculture and 500 in construction, according to the report.

The rise in jobs follows the seasonal trend in Ventura County, where employment usually expands through the end of the agricultural season in June.

The March jobless rate was down sharply from the 1992 peak of 10.2% in November, and the lowest since May of last year when the rate was 7%.

The apparent rise in construction jobs reflected a weather-related fluctuation in the troubled sector, said Robert Guillen, executive secretary of the Ventura County Building and Construction Trades Council.

“We have no real improvement in the construction job picture,” said Guillen, who added that the unemployment rate is running between 30% and 35% for all of the building trades, including electrical and plumbing.

Guillen said the outlook for the rest of the year is uncertain once work is completed on the new Ventura County jail near Santa Paula and on the expansion of Amgen, a bioengineering company in Thousand Oaks. With 240 construction jobs, the Amgen project is the largest in the county, he said.

“Without Amgen and the jail, we’d be in super-bad shape, and there are no big projects coming up that I can see,” Guillen said.

As soon as the winter rains ended, demand by area farmers for strawberry pickers outstripped the supply of available labor, said Aveline Villalobos, who manages the state employment office in Oxnard.

“Traditionally, this is our full-employment period in agriculture,” Villalobos said about the Oxnard employment office, which serves more farm workers than other employment offices in the county.

“After the rain stopped, the growers did a lot of repair work initially,” Villalobos said. “They had to take the berries that were damaged off the plants so that the flowers could bloom in full force. Then, the berries ripened all at once.”

County Agricultural Commissioner Earl McPhail said the season’s heavy rains fell in a relatively short period this year, leading to a large strawberry crop and a shortage of labor to harvest it.

“It’s eased up now,” McPhail said of the labor shortage. “The situation is getting pretty much back to normal.”

Despite the improved jobs rate in March, economist Bruce DeVine of the Southern California Assn. of Governments pointed to job losses from one year to the next as evidence the area’s economy has not yet rebounded.

The decline in March of 3,800 jobs from the Ventura County payroll compared to last year marked the 31st time in the last 32 months that jobs had declined in the county from a year earlier.

Yet DeVine also said scattered signs have appeared that suggest the area’s economy may be nearing the bottom of its fall. The declines in annual job losses have slowed in recent months, and several sectors of the regional economy, including publishing and services for business, health and motion picture industries, have begun to grow again, he said.

In Ventura County, claims for initial jobless benefits fell to 5,097 in March, down from 5,791 initial claims in February, labor officials said. However, applications for benefit extensions rose slightly to 2,312 in March from 2,176 the previous month as more of the unemployed remained out of work.

But DeVine said job growth is often one of the last economic indicators to improve when the economy grows.