The Inland Empire’s unemployment rate dropped to its lowest in more than five years in December to 8.9 percent, reflecting gains in retail and warehousing and raising hopes that the region’s economy is revving up again after years of bad news.
The last time the Inland Empire’s unemployment rate was at 8.9 percent was July 2008, said Michael Goss, spokesman on labor force and industry employment data for the state Employment Development Department, which released the numbers on Friday.
In the last year alone, between December 2012 and December 2013, the unemployment rate for the area encompassing San Bernardino and Riverside counties dropped from 11 percent, with total nonfarm employment increasing by 14,000 jobs and agricultural employment falling by 300 jobs. The trade, transportation and utilities sector posted the largest overall gain with the addition of 9,100 jobs, with nearly 62 percent of that growth in the retail trade.
In the region, the better jobs numbers were raising some eyebrows, and some hopes.
In Fontana, California Steel has seen steady job growth since 2010, said Brett Guge, executive vice president of finance and administration.
“We continue to gradually build up from where we were during the recession,” Guge said Friday. “We have roughly 960 permanent (employees) and another 100 contractors and temporary employees.”
The steel plant had been operating with 800-plus employees during the recession. The initial job loss was attributed mainly to attrition, and when the recession hit those vacant positions were not filled. In 2009, the company began filling those positions again, Guge said.
Now, California Steel has several job openings at any given time and the company is always looking for skilled mechanical and electrical technicians, Guge said.
“Since 2009, each year has been a little bit better than the past. We’re still not quite back to the production levels we were prior to the recession, but we’re closer,” Guge said.
In San Bernardino, business owner Pang Vithean spoke about the future with optimism.
Vithean, owner of The Flaming Grill, opened his small eatery in December in downtown, anticipating a continuing economic recovery and demand from workers at the new courthouse building to open nearby later this year.
“We expect it to improve and to grow, and hope it will grow,” Vithean said of the local economy.
Though economic recovery has been slow and marginal, Vithean remains optimistic that jobs will continue opening up for people.
“People still don’t have a lot of jobs, but we believe it’s getting better,” he said.
Since opening shop, Vithean has hired one employee at his San Bernardino restaurant, and he has hopes to hire more when the new courthouse opens down the street.
For every 50 customers each day, Vithean hopes to add two or three employees over the next several months.
Vithean’s employee, Lina Chea, said she was hired at Flaming Grill after a year without a full-time job and with a family to support.
“It was so hard for me,” she said.
Vithean wasn’t the only who has some hiring optimism. So does Amazon, which opened its giant distribution center in 2012 in San Bernardino.
Amazon expects to continue hiring this year, and recently announced plans to open a distribution center in Moreno Valley, where more than 1,000 full-time jobs will be created, Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Cheeseman said in an email Friday.
The doubling of jobs at the Amazon distribution center (700 to 1,400), from the time it opened for operations in October 2012 to the time of its grand opening in October 2013, factored into the region’s warehouse sector growth. Transportation, warehousing and utilities increased by 2,000 jobs, with an additional 1,500 jobs in the wholesale trade, according to latest Employment Development Department statistics.
While Amazon doesn’t specifically track where its employees come from, most are from the Inland Empire, Jackie Underberg, Amazon’s general manager, told this newspaper.
Broken down by county, San Bernardino County’s unemployment rate was at 8.7 percent as of December 2013, and Riverside County’s was 9.1 percent.
The data is in line with San Bernardino County figures, which show that the county’s labor force increased by 3,000 workers from July 2011 to the present, said Kelly Reenders, administrator of the county Economic Development Agency.
She said the county continues to see new businesses breaking ground and existing businesses expanding.
The Inland Empire was one of the hardest hit regions in the nation during the Great Recession, hitting a peak 14.6 percent unemployment rate in early 2010.
The data also mirror some better numbers statewide.
The EDD estimates that 17 million California residents had jobs in December, up 24,000 from November and 291,000 from December 2012.
But the jobs numbers might actually be better than what the EDD reports. The unemployment rate is derived from a federal survey of 5,500 California households while job growth is based on a survey of 42,000 businesses around the state.
Some economists note that the monthly EDD report does not capture what is actually going on in the economy and that stronger growth is reflected in quarterly data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state’s annual revision to the jobs data will be done later this year.
And that has some taking the news with a grain of salt.
“Initially it sounds like good news, but we have to be cautious,” said Paul Granillo, president and CEO of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, which works with the region’s largest businesses and educational institutions to improve the area’s business climate and quality of life.
He said the unemployment figures are based on a survey of residents that may not accurately reflect the number of people who are actually unemployed, given the way the questions are framed in the survey.
“It may look like it’s great news, but the reality is there are still a lot of people who still do not have jobs,” Granillo said.
Staff Writer Gregory J. Wilcox contributed to this story.
via: http://www.sbsun.com/business/20140124/inland-empires-jobless-rate-lowest-since-2008
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