State Posts Biggest Gain in Jobs Since ’98

California posted its biggest jobs gain in more than two years last month, pushing unemployment back down to 4.8% and reducing joblessness in the Latino work force to another record low.

State officials reported Friday that California added 64,400 jobs in April. It was the latest demonstration of how the labor market here is catching up with tight-labor conditions in the rest of the country.

California’s unemployment rate was down from a revised 5% in March and is now just slightly above the 30-year low of 4.6% that it hit in February.

Still, joblessness in California remains substantially above the national average. U.S. unemployment in April, as previously reported, was 3.9%, the country’s lowest rate since 1970.

In California, the economy is benefiting from a rebound in exports to Asia, growing high-tech industries and a greater availability of workers than in many other states. Even though rising interest rates threaten the long-awaited comeback in home construction, “the outlook for the state’s economy is very strong,” said Ross C. DeVol, director of regional studies for the Milken Institute in Santa Monica.

Ted Gibson, economist for the state Department of Finance, shared the optimism. The employment reports for the first four months of the year, he said, put California on track to add about half a million jobs this year. “I don’t see anything that would change that,” he said.

Whether California’s unemployment rate will fall to the national level over the next year or two remains in doubt. The state is hampered by, among other things, a shortage of affordable housing and the persistent high unemployment in much of the San Joaquin Valley, which is heavily dependent on agriculture and shrinking food-processing industries.

With unemployment in Tulare County at 15% and Fresno County at 14.9%, the valley includes some of the highest-unemployment metropolitan areas in the country.

The state’s broad-based job gains, however, have started to benefit those areas, as well as minorities that traditionally have had high levels of unemployment in California and across the nation.

For California’s Latinos, unemployment edged down from 6.6% in March to 6.5% in April, the lowest level since the state started keeping separate figures for racial and ethnic groups in 1988.

“The good news is that Latino unemployment has come down dramatically, but the bad news is that it is still substantially higher than it is for non-Hispanic whites and Asians,” DeVol said. He blamed Latinos’ lower average education and skill levels for the gap.

For blacks, unemployment last month remained at its record low of 8.3%. All the same, African Americans continue to post the highest rate of joblessness for any major racial or ethnic group in the state. Among whites, unemployment was 4.8%, down from 4.9%.

All told, California continues to make a robust comeback from the recession that punished the state, particularly Los Angeles County, in the early 1990s. The state accounted for 18.8% of the new jobs created across the country last month.

The unemployment rate for Los Angeles County was 5.4% in April, unchanged from March. Orange County, one of the state’s economic powerhouses, posted a rate of 2.2%, down from a revised 2.4% in March.

California’s employment growth was spread over eight of its nine major nonfarm job categories. The biggest gain was in services, an increase of 18,500 jobs, coming mainly in business services such as temporary help agencies, software, computer programming and advertising.

Also making substantial gains were construction, retailing and government, the latter boosted by school-district hiring. Even manufacturing, which has slumped nationally and in California, squeezed out an increase of 3,200 jobs.

The only nonfarm category showing a decline was the finance, insurance and real estate segment, which dropped 1,200, apparently largely because of cutbacks in the banking industry.

Employment specialists say the economic expansion, along with benefiting minorities, is helping disabled workers, welfare recipients and others who are trying to lift their way out of poverty through job-training programs.

Michael S. Bernick, involved in job training for more than 20 years and the current director of the California Employment Development Department, said the market for newly trained workers is the best he has ever seen.

“The difficulty in the past hasn’t been so much the ability to train people, but the ability to find jobs for people [after completing training]. Now it’s a great time to be in job training because jobs actually are out there,” Bernick said.

On the other hand, many employers say they are struggling to find workers. Rainy Robinson, owner of the Driversity Driving School chain in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she has been unable to fill openings for driving instructor jobs paying $12 an hour or more, with benefits.

“I could use at least four more instructors. Last month I spent $500 in advertising in the local newspaper, and it’s yielded no one,” she said.

Statewide, April’s job increase was the highest since January 1998, when employment climbed by 73,500. For the first four months of this year, California’s unemployment rate has averaged 4.8% and its monthly job gains have averaged 40,800. For all of last year, the state’s unemployment rate averaged 5.2% and its monthly job increases averaged 31,342.

Unemployment rates among other Southern California counties:

* Ventura County: 3.5%, down from 3.8% in March.

* Riverside: 4.6%, down from 4.8%.

* San Bernardino: 4.2%, down from 4.4%.

* San Diego: 2.6%, down from 2.8%.

With the exception of the figures for California and Los Angeles County, the employment numbers released by state officials are not adjusted for seasonal trends.