Newport keeps more jobs than county

The unemployment picture in Orange County isn’t pretty, but Newport Beach and Costa Mesa are faring better than the countywide rate.

Orange County employers slashed 14,600 jobs in January, and the unemployment rate grew to 10.1%, the highest since 1950, the California Employment Development Department reported Wednesday.

Newport Beach posted a jobless rate of 6.4%, while Costa Mesa came in a point under the county average with a 9.1% unemployment rate.

While fewer retail jobs accounted for large losses in employment, as is typical after the holidays, they combined with an already high unemployment rate and anemic job growth to send the county over the modern record.

“Not only are people losing their seasonal jobs, but other companies aren’t hiring to absorb the new workforce,” said Esmael Adibi, a Chapman University economist.

He pointed out that unemployed workers have been buoyed by signs of recovery, and started looking for work again, essentially re-entering the workforce. This has brought the rate higher.

Besides the high unemployment rate, a surprising figure released Wednesday was the revised job numbers for 2009 — Orange County lost a total of 100,600 jobs between December 2008 and December 2009, up significantly from its preliminary number of 49,000 jobs lost.

Ann Marshal, an Orange County economist for the state Employment Development Department, said that in a volatile economy it’s normal to see downward revisions, although this was a higher revision than last year.

In January alone, Orange County lost 5,700 jobs in trade, transportation and utilities and 3,000 in professional and business services.

The sectors that have been hit the hardest over the last year are construction and manufacturing — both lost more than 15,000 jobs between January 2009 and January 2010.

The unemployment rate is likely to keep creeping up in the next few months, Adibi anticipated, until companies start generating about 3,000 new jobs per month.

But Orange County is in better shape than the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metro area, which reached 15% in January, its highest since 1990, and California, which was at 12.5%.