Jobless Rate Drops to 6.6% in December

Despite wild fluctuations in Ventura County’s unemployment rate during the closing months of 1995, the local job market finished the year in its best shape since 1991, an economist said Wednesday.

At the end of December, only 6.6% of the county’s work force was unemployed, according to statistics released Wednesday by the state’s Employment Development Department. That figure--up slightly from 6.4% in December 1994--shows a dramatic improvement from November, when the jobless rate had jumped to 8.6%, up more than a percentage point from the previous month.

Economist Mark Schniepp said the year’s average unemployment rate was 7.3%, the county’s best showing since 1991.

“Ventura has now completely recovered in the labor markets, in the sense that it has made up all the job losses incurred during the recession,” he said.

Countywide, 358,700 residents were employed at the end of December, up slightly from 355,700 the previous year.

Many industries added local jobs during 1995. Business services--a field that can include everything from consulting firms to copy shops--added 1,100 new jobs during the year. And farm employment, a major component of the local economy, grew by 12.1%.

But Schniepp, director of UC Santa Barbara’s Economic Forecast Project, worried that the county was hemorrhaging high-salaried jobs in such fields as manufacturing, which dropped 400 local positions last year.

“We’re still losing some of these higher-paying jobs, which is causing the overall wealth of the county to go down,” he said.

Pierre Tada, president of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn., blamed the continuing erosion of manufacturing jobs on government regulations that frighten companies looking to expand.

“If someone wants to come into the county and build a facility, whether it’s perception or reality, there’s still a concern about the time and amount of red tape it will take to get the job done,” he said.

Those hunting for jobs last year found some opportunities but also some heavy competition.

In September, Albert Borroel of Oxnard was laid off from his production technician job with a subsidiary of General Electric. He finally landed a job four weeks ago at M & L Furniture Service in Santa Paula, where he helps refinish and repair furniture.

During his months of unemployment, Borroel sent out 20 to 30 applications, trying for jobs ranging from grocery store meat cutter to groundskeeper for a local school district.

“I was looking for anything available to get myself back into the work force,” he said. But for each opening, Borroel found himself up against a mass of other job seekers.

“For one job, you had probably 70 applicants,” he said. “So they can pick and chose.”

Gary Hodge of Ventura estimates that he sent out 100 applications before finding his new job, although his case differs substantially from Borroel’s. Because of a knee injury that made walking or standing painful, Hodge had not held a steady job in four years.

Homeless when he moved to the county, Hodge lived for a year in the Ventura River bottom before he was able to obtain government retraining assistance.

He took word processing and data entry classes and started applying for any job requiring computer skills.

“When I would look through the paper, I’d notice that jobs were plentiful, but mostly for people with a lot of experience,” he said.

With the county’s help, Hodge found a job filling out repair forms and answering phones at Brett’s Automotive in Ventura. Hodge, who had once given up on the idea of landing another job, said he was happy and relieved to finally find employment.

“It’s really good to be back working in society and carrying my responsibilities as a citizen,” he said. “This is the ideal job I’d been looking for.”

Borroel said there are jobs available if a person has the patience and determination to dig for them.

“Go out every day, and don’t give up,” he said. “You’ll find something eventually.”