Unemployment Rate Inches Up to 5.8%

Ventura County lost about 5,600 jobs in January, due mostly to seasonal layoffs in the retail trade and service industries that pushed the local unemployment rate up to 5.8%.

According to a report released Friday by the state’s Employment Development Department, retail trade firms cut their payrolls by about 2,600 jobs last month, due primarily to the post-holiday slowdown.

Service industry and construction firms trimmed their work forces in January by about 1,700 jobs.

Analysts, however, cautioned not to read too much into the new rate, which is up slightly from December’s 5.2%, saying that the county’s employment sector remains robust.

“January is typically a tricky month because of the holidays, and a lot of the layoffs we’re seeing here we see every year,” said Dee Johnson, the department’s labor market analyst for Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. “Looking back historically, though, there’s been a pretty strong [employment] growth rate, which has averaged about 4% for the past two years.”

In the most illustrative year-to-year comparisons, the county’s unemployment rate dropped by half a percentage point between January 1998 and January 1999, with the creation of about 9,700 jobs in all nonfarm industries except mining.

A majority of those new jobs were created in the service industry, which added 2,800 positions; in construction, which increased its payrolls by about 2,700; and in trade, which created 1,700 positions.

Ventura County, whose January unemployment rate ranks 19th among California’s 58 counties, is still being carried by the economic momentum it collected through last year.

Most analysts agree that this year will be less lustrous in overall economic growth as the national and state economies begin to cool.

That trend could translate into more modest job creation and less growth in some of the more fragile industrial sectors.

Manufacturing, always a very sensitive industry, lost about 200 jobs last month and could suffer the most if the economy begins to slow.

But few experts are predicting any noticeable slowdown in the next few months.

The overall job rate should remain rather strong, some analysts predict, because Ventura County businesses are, for the most part, growing faster than the job pool.

“The labor market is so tight right now that I wouldn’t be surprised if we see little change in the unemployment rate through the year,” said economist Mark Schniepp, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project. “Employers are still having to look outside to find qualified people, so that should keep the rates pretty low.”