California Loses 10,500 Jobs
California’s job market showed no improvement in November, posting a net loss of 10,500 positions, most of them in the slumping manufacturing sector, the Employment Development Department reported Friday.
A separate survey of households showed that the state’s jobless rate fell to 6.4% in November from a revised 6.5% in October.
But economists put more stock in the payroll survey, which is considered a better barometer of the job market.
In the last year, the state’s employers have added a paltry 2,800 net new jobs.
Analysts say weak earnings, war jitters and continuing gains in productivity give employers little incentive to beef up their payrolls.
“We’re still skipping along the bottom,” said economist Lisa Grobar, director of the Cal State Long Beach Economic Forecast Project.
A year ago, the unemployment rate in California stood at 6.1%. The pre-recession low of 4.7% came in February 2001.
To be sure, the rise in unemployment is mild compared with what occurred during previous downturns. But the concentration of job losses in the Bay Area this time around is having far-reaching effects on the state’s economy.
The decline in high-paying technology jobs has left California much worse off in terms of income than the rest of the country and is a big reason the state faces a $20-billion-plus budget deficit. From its peak of 5.7 million jobs in early 2001, U.S. technology employment has plunged by more than half a million -- one in five of them in California.
The hardest-hit area has been Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley.
Nonfarm payroll employment in the county declined by 2,700 jobs last month, with most of the losses coming in high-tech manufacturing.
The county has lost more than 110,000 jobs since its employment peaked in December 2000. The November unemployment rate in Santa Clara County was 7.8%, down from its most recent high of 8.1% in October but up sharply from its pre-recession low of 1.3% in December 2000.
“The technology sector continues to be a drag on the California economy,” said Michael Bernick, director of the EDD.
Southern California has been a bulwark of stability in comparison. Although growth has slowed markedly since the height of the economic boom, the five-county region that consists of Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties has managed to eke out a 0.1% gain in nonfarm payroll jobs in the last year, according to state data.
Still, some economists predict that the figure will be revised downward when the EDD completes its annual “benchmark” revision in February. The yearly revision uses the latest available data from tax records to update the previous year’s employment figures.
“I think we’re going to see that the recession was deeper than we thought” in terms of job losses, said Esmael Adibi, director of the Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University in Orange.
Only three of the state’s industry sectors -- government, mining, and insurance and real estate -- posted job gains during November.
The losers were led by the manufacturing sector, which shed 9,700 jobs. The state’s factories have pared jobs in all but one of the last 22 months, and manufacturing employment is down 63,100 since November 2001.
The Los Angeles County unemployment rate dropped to 6% in November from a revised 6.2% in October.
Orange County’s unemployment rate dipped to 3.9% in November from 4.1% in October.
In the Inland Empire, Riverside County’s rate dropped to 6.1% from 6.6%, and San Bernardino’s eased to 5.4% from 5.7%.
Ventura County’s jobless rate rose to 5.7% in November from 5.5% the month before.
