Yesterday the California Employment Development Department released the monthly unemployment/jobs report. This report includes the state’s preliminary employment numbers for December, plus revised data for the previous month (November 2011). In this exclusive OC180NEWS special report, we look into the Orange County employment numbers.
As is standard procedure for EDD, county specific employment data is not seasonally adjusted. Therefore, none of the data in this article, including state totals, is seasonally adjusted. For that reason, the data reported here may not agree with other reports which use seasonally adjusted state totals.
The big news in the newest data is not the Orange County employment numbers for December, but rather the revised November data. In our last monthly article, we reported the state’s data indicated OC employment results for November were the worst in ten years. That was then, this is now.
As it turns out, the good news is that the state’s November data was not very accurate. Rather than a loss of 2,500 jobs as originally reported for November (the worst November job growth in at least ten years), the new Orange County job numbers are an increase of 6,600 jobs.
The revised job growth is still well below the 9,990 ten year average of October to November job growth. But rather than being the worst year of the last ten, the new job growth ranks fourth best behind 2008 (54,500 jobs added), 2005 (8,500 new jobs), and 2004 (10,400 new jobs).
After the strong revised November job creation, the OC job numbers for December fell short when compared to historical December numbers. In fact, with November to December job growth of only 1,300 new jobs, 2011 is the third from the bottom of the last ten years. Only 2008 (which experienced job losses of 70,700) and 2010 (job losses of 1,200) had worse December job numbers than 2011.
Nevertheless, for the entire year, with a net increase of 24,600 new jobs in Orange County, 2011 is the third best of the last ten years. The year 2005 added 31,100 new jobs and 2004 had a gain of 32,000 new jobs.
The new job numbers means that Orange County has recovered 58,500 of the 206,800 jobs loss during the Great Recession. The highest level of Orange County employment was 1,539,800 jobs in December 2006. The number of jobs in Orange County fell to 1,333,000 by January 2010, a loss of 13%. Now, five years after the high point in OC employment, the recent gains trim the loss to 10%. Also, the current level of employment at 1,391,500 is the highest level of employment in Orange County since March 2009.
By comparison, for the state in total, jobs lost during the recession were 11% of the total jobs. Now, that loss is down to 7%. In Los Angeles, the maximum jobs lost were also 11%, and it has recovered to an 8% loss. For San Diego, the total losses were 9% and now it stands at 5%.
All of the data in this article is from reports provided by the California Employment Development Department. The text and analysis are by OC180NEWS.
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About Dolores Barr, Publisher
Dolores Barr has lived in Rossmoor since 1992 and has created this site to provide local news for the people of Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Rossmoor, Leisure World, Sunset Beach, and Surfside, California. My husband and I have had two students graduate from the Los Alamitos Unified School District and currently our Grandson, Ricky Apodaca, grade 3 at Weaver Elementary, is actively involved in youth baseball through LAYB and youth football through FNL.
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