State Posts Biggest Jobs Gain 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.

In Orange County, one of the state’s economic powerhouses, the jobless rate dipped to 2.2%, matching the all-time low set in December. Unemployment in March stood at a revised 2.4%.

The jobless rate was the lowest in Southern California and one of the lowest in the state, reflecting the county’s ongoing economic growth.

While the news remains positive, the increasingly tight labor market promises to put pressure on wages, fueling inflation, warned Esmael Adibi, director for the Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University.

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, previously reported, was 3.9%, the 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.

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%.

California continues to rebound from the recession that punished the state 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’s 2.2% jobless rate, which is not adjusted for seasonal factors, was the fourth lowest in the state, behind San Mateo, Marin and Santa Clara counties.

Over the past year, Orange County has added nearly 41,000 jobs, with business services, construction, government and retail posting the biggest gains. The only sector losing workers was mining, which declined by 200 positions.

In coming months, amusement park payrolls should grow as Knott’s adds workers for its new water park set to open next month and Disneyland begins hiring workers for its new California Adventure theme park, which is scheduled to open next year.

“We’re hiring more people than we ever have,” said Knott’s spokesman Bob Ochsner, noting that Knott’s plans to add 1,000 workers for the summer.

In August, Disneyland will begin hiring 7,000 workers, largely for its new theme park, spokesman Ray Gomez said.

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 now 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.

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.

Staff writer Marc Ballon contributed to this report.