Jobless Rate Holds at 7.3% for 5th Consecutive Month

WASHINGTON —  Unemployment remained 7.3% in June for the fifth consecutive month, the Labor Department reported today, the longest period the jobless rate has remained at the same level in more than 15 years.

(Joblessness in the Los Angeles area jumped to 7.7% from May’s 7%, while California’s rate spurted the same amount, to 7.8% from 7.1%.)

Nationwide, the service sector continued to add employment in June with 85,000 new jobs.

But total employment, which had hit a record 106.96 million in May, fell to 106.37 million in June. Despite that, the ranks of the unemployed held steady at 8.4 million for the fifth straight month because of a sharp drop-off in the number of people looking for work.

The last time there was a five-month standstill in unemployment was when the rate was frozen at 3.4% from the fall of 1968 to the spring of 1969.

“We feel the weakness in the manufacturing sector is holding the unemployment situation . . . unchanged,” said Dorothea Otte, an analyst at the Economic Forecasting Project in Atlanta.

In testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, Janet L. Norwood, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, acknowledged that the numbers show clear, serious trouble in manufacturing industries such as steel, textiles and leather products.

But she added that the figures show a continuing trend toward service jobs.

“A lot of people believe the United States is losing good jobs and gaining bad jobs,” she said. “There is the view that we are becoming a nation of hamburger makers. That is not true. There seems to be a shift out of lower-paying occupations into higher-paying occupations.”

Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) called the continuing unemployment rate “very, very high . . . a real recession level.”

Manufacturing employment declined 45,000 from May to June, continuing a slide that has cost the nation 220,000 jobs since January.

In June, there were these developments in unemployment rates for various sectors of the labor market: Adult men, 6.5%, up from 6.1% in May; adult women, 6.7%, down from 6.9%; teen-agers, 18.3%, down from 18.9%; whites, 6.5%, up from 6.2%; blacks, 14%, down from 15.6%, and Latinos, 10.6%, down from 10.7%.

Problems in manufacturing have been caused over the past several years by the high value of the U.S. dollar.