Recession Fading for O.C. Jobless : Economy: With unemployment at a 29-month low, people out of work for years are back on a payroll. But many take a cut in wages.

Virginia Barnes’ recession started in December, 1991, when she was laid off from an electronics assembly job at Rockwell International Corp.’s defense plant in Anaheim.

It may have ended last Tuesday, when she started work at an expanding Anaheim electronics manufacturer, QLP Laminates Inc. “It was a real struggle,” Barnes says. “I’m so happy that it’s over.”

Barnes is one of the more than 4,000 people who were added to Orange County employers’ payrolls in May, bringing the county’s unemployment rate down to 5.3%--the lowest rate in 29 months.

Economists say the burst of hiring in May, the latest month for which data is available, reflects the beginning of a recovery after four grueling years of recession, which officially began in the United States in July, 1990.

“It still has a ways to go, but the job market has definitely picked up,” says Tony Chow, a Laguna Niguel consultant who works with struggling companies.

But Chow and others see a downside. The latest employment growth appears lopsided, favoring entry-level job seekers in the service industry over those who are looking for management positions or high-paying manufacturing positions. As such, many of the newly hired people seem to be making far less in wages today than they did in the glory days of the aerospace and real estate industries in Orange County during the 1980s.

Barnes, for example, says she’s now making only half of the $14 an hour she was paid at Rockwell. But she isn’t complaining. This new electronics assembly job beats standing at a freeway off-ramp with a “Will Work for Food” sign, she says in all seriousness. And not everyone who has landed a new job in Orange County recently has had to take a pay cut.

Neeltje Mack, an industrial hygienist, says the $70,000-plus salary she now receives in the growing environmental clean-up unit of Holmes & Narver in Orange represents a “nice” increase from her previous salary at TRW Corp.’s shrinking space and electronics division in Redondo Beach. She’s among those who are able to take advantage of the recovery to improve her job status.

To be sure, there are still thousands of jobless workers in Orange County, and county employment remains woefully short of pre-recession levels: The recently revised count by the state Employment Development Department shows that there were 54,600 fewer full- and part-time jobs in Orange County in May than in May, 1990, just before the recession began.

But signs of local economic recovery are increasingly there for those who look for them, such as Kim Megonigal, owner of Kimco Services Inc., an Irvine-based employment agency with four offices in Orange County.

Megonigal says his business this year is up 65% from a year earlier. One indicator of a recovery, he notes, is that employers are converting temporary positions to regular full-time jobs, reflecting greater confidence in the economy. “We’re seeing a dramatic turn of events.”

James Doti, president of Chapman University in Orange and the private school’s chief economic forecaster, agrees.

In December, Doti’s annual Orange County forecast--a report used by hundreds of business leaders in the county for corporate planning--said that 1994 would be a sluggish period with minimal job growth.

But just 10 days ago, in his midyear update, Doti revised his outlook. Now, he predicts, the county will end 1994 with 10,000 additional jobs than at the end of 1993--the first growth year of this decade.

Orange County’s recovery, he said, finally has begun.

Here, then, are some faces of the recovery: stories of Orange County people who have found new hope at the start of the economic comeback.