San Diego County employers added more jobs to their payrolls in June than they have in any single month in more than two years.
Local employers added 13,400 workers to their payrolls last month. Only in April 2010, when they added 13,500 jobs, was there a larger number of people hired in a single month.
The data, released Friday by the state Employment Development Department, comes at a time of growing skepticism among employers over the health of the economy. The presidential election, health care reform, the European debt crisis and the year-end fiscal cliff have kept hiring slow, economists said.
“It looked like we were losing momentum, but San Diego has shown significant resilience,” said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University.
Still, the unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent. It was 8.8 percent in May.
The June growth is also a big jump from what employers added in June 2011, when they hired 3,900 workers. In June 2010, they only added 1,500.
June is typically a month with significant hiring in the leisure and tourism industry. The field added 7,200 workers last month, the most of any sector.
“I don’t think a lot of it is artificially high because when you do the June-to-June comparisons, last June you had to have summer hiring as well,” said Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego.
Gin said the most important number is the 24,000 jobs gained from June 2011 to June 2012. It’s the kind of year-over-year growth economists say will really take a chunk out of the unemployment rate.
It’s the highest year-over-year job growth since May 2005, when county employers added 25,100 jobs. The jobless rate then, however, was 4.1 percent.
We finally got the job growth, but the unemployment rate still went up.
Well, blame the grads.
Gin said June is historically one of the worst months for the unemployment rate, largely because college and high school graduates enter the labor force and other students look for summer jobs. May, conversely, is one of the best (the county’s 8.8 percent rate in May was a three-year low).
San Diego State University issued about 7,000 bachelor’s degrees in May, and the University of San Diego about 3,000. The University of California, San Diego graduated roughly 6,000 in June. The labor force grew by 14,900 last month.
Gin said when adjusted for seasonal factors, like college graduation, the county’s unemployment rate is 8.8 percent.
Still, summer hiring seemed to be the reason for the job growth, with its 7,200 jobs.
“We are seeing a significant rebound in tourism, which appears to be more than just the seasonal increase,” Reaser said.
Construction added the second-most jobs with 2,600.
Kelly Cunningham, an economist at the National University System Institute for Policy Research, said June’s gain was significant. He said the 13,500 jobs added in April 2010 were largely due to government census workers being hired. This June, the government sector shrank the most of any industry, losing 700 jobs.
In terms of growth, professional and business services added 1,800 jobs in June, and posted the largest year-over-year gain at 7,200. Most of those jobs came in professional, scientific and technical services. Administrative, support and waste also accounted for about a third of those jobs.
The state has monthly job data going back to 1990. After April 2010, the next highest month of growth came in February 1995, when the county added 12,600 jobs and had a 6.2 percent unemployment rate.
Statewide, California’s unemployment rate was 10.7 percent in June, adding 38,300 jobs. The nation’s was 8.4 percent.
San Diego’s unemployment rate tends to be lower than the state’s due to a diverse economy that includes in-demand fields such as tech, health, research and defense, economists have said.
By Jonathan Horn
