‘93 RANKS AS O.C.’S WORST YEAR FOR JOBS IN A DECADE : Labor: County’s average unemployment rate climbed to 6.3%. Some temporary holiday hiring eased the gloom, but lots of cutbacks are permanent.
Establishing 1993 as the worst year for jobs here in a decade, the state Employment Development Department said Friday that Orange County employers lopped more than 18,000 jobs from their payrolls last year.
December’s jobless rate actually dropped to 5.3% from 5.6% in November, but the improvement was entirely because of temporary retail hiring for the holidays. For the year, the county’s average unemployment rate climbed to 6.3%--the highest since 7.1% for 1983, at the end of the last recession.
The annual number came as no surprise to Alan J. Meister. The 45-year-old Mission Viejo man was laid off in December as controller of FHP International Corp.’s insurance division--victim of a so-called re-engineering. The health maintenance organization’s regrouping, prompted by its acquisition of another company, resulted in 400 layoffs.
Meister, the father of seven children--five of whom still live at home--was one of 800 service industry workers who lost jobs with Orange County businesses in December.
What he and thousands like him are experiencing, employment professionals say, is much more than the typical temporary joblessness that accompanies a recession.
“A lot of companies have cut back permanently,” said Sue Foigleman, area manager for Manpower Temporary Services Inc. “They have reduced middle management ranks substantially, automated their production. Their need for people is less and will stay less.”
Foigleman and others in the temporary employment field say their businesses have benefited from the cutbacks. Companies are reluctant to add permanent jobs when things pick up and are using temporary workers everywhere, from factory assembly lines to corporate strategic planning offices.
Career development specialist P. Anthony Burnham said that many companies also use temporary workers “to test-drive people” before deciding whether to hire permanently. As a result, the job market “is tough and is going to remain tough,” he said. “There is no great optimism that we’ll see a return to the open job markets of the past.”
Burnham’s ProActive Institute, based in Costa Mesa, is retained by companies to help laid-off workers develop career goals and job-finding skills.
The American Management Assn. found in its 1993 survey of major corporations’ employment plans that more than 25% intend to make further cuts in their payrolls this year.
“This downsizing is not a child of the recession,” the editors of the survey wrote.
For Meister, that means accepting that he may have to live with unemployment for a while. “It is a real roller-coaster ride out there,” he said. “Some days are positive--maybe you’ve got a good lead or even an interview--but others can be real disappointing. You have to learn to rise above the effect on you and your family of not having a job.”
It also means a change in job-hunting approaches. It is no longer an interview but a business meeting, and successful applicants aren’t looking for work, they are marketing themselves.
Meister, a ProActive client, talks the talk: “You have to market yourself as a product. . . . I tell prospective employers the results I can obtain for them, based on my past achievements. . . . I see the market improving, but one opening can result in 100 resumes, so you have to be aggressive and creative.”
That means not limiting the job hunt to the obvious. Meister was trained as an accountant, and his career has been in financial management, but he tells employers that his strengths are in organization and general administration as well as finance. “I try to look for positions in which I could utilize any of these skills,” he said.
He is also looking across the nation--something others among the county’s unemployed may be forced to do if the economy in Southern California remains in a slump.
In all, according to state labor market analyst Eleanor Jordan, payrolls based in Orange County declined by 1,000 positions in December despite a gain of 3,300 temporary retailing jobs.
The local employment count provides a better look at the county’s economic health than the broader unemployment rate published by the state. Because the local tally counts jobs actually located in Orange County, it helps track how well or poorly local businesses are doing. The jobless rate, by contrast, is an estimate of the number of unemployed county residents, no matter where their jobs were. So a Fullerton resident laid off from a job in Los Angeles would show up in the statistics as part of Orange County’s unemployment.
(A1) Jobless Rate Declines
After peaking at 7.4% in July, Orange County’s unemployment rate slowly declined to 5.3% by December. The 6.3% annual average, however, made 1993 the worst year for county joblessness in a decade.
December: 5.30
Source: California Employment Development Department
