County Posts 8.8% Jobless Rate; Figure Called Inflated : Labor: Experts say seasonal factors, including summer recess at schools, raised August unemployment.

Ventura County’s unemployment rate for August was 8.8%, state officials reported Friday, a figure that economists say is artificially inflated by two seasonal factors.

Nearly 3,000 educators show up as unemployed in the report because schools were in summer recess. Also, harvesting temporarily slowed down, putting 1,700 farm laborers out of work.

The August rate is slightly lower than July’s 9.3% figure. A year ago at this time, the county’s unemployment rate was 9.5%. Ventura County’s unemployment rate remains nearly three points higher than the national rate.

Traditionally, lulls in agricultural production hit in July and August, then again in December and January, said Rex Laird, head of the Ventura County Farm Bureau.

But workers already have started planting strawberries, which will need to be harvested in a few months. And the second phase of the vegetable season is just beginning, Laird said.

The need for workers to harvest those crops should soon help boost the unemployment rate, he said.

“I would even anticipate some pickup in September,” Laird said.

Mark Schniepp, an economist with the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project, said there were no surprises in the report.

“There is no net great news in here,” Schniepp said. “But is it negative? No. It is really just kind of neutral.”

Other major losses were in finance, real estate, insurance and services, which each lost 500 jobs. Manufacturing, which has been steadily declining over the past year, lost 300 jobs. Schniepp said that trend is expected to continue.

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Small gains were posted in retail--a consistently healthy area for the county over the past year--and the construction trade grew by 200 jobs, probably as a result of post-earthquake construction and repairs.

“Those jobs will probably be very temporary,” Schniepp said. “But what the heck, a job is a job at this point.”

Schniepp said one figure in the report did jump out at him: a drop of 5,600 in the county’s labor force since July.

“That is where you are getting the real drop in the unemployment rate,” he said. “Either these people are getting discouraged and not even bothering to look for a job, or they are leaving the county to find work elsewhere.”

The idea that the economy may be forcing residents out of the county is particularly disturbing to Carolyn Leavens, president of the Ventura County Economic Development Agency.

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“We need to keep these highly skilled people in Ventura if we can,” Leavens said. “Change always comes hard to us and we tend to wail and gnash our teeth. But change is only bad if you let it roll right over you.”

Ventura County needs to reinvent its economy, Leavens said. Workers with technical skills, particularly those previously employed in manufacturing, need to be retrained and encouraged to go out on their own and start new businesses, she said.

“We’ve got to look at the whole picture differently,” she said. “Our answers are going to be different than they ever have been before. If the powers that be in Ventura County can give these people the support they need then we can do it.”