California's unemployment rate shot up in March as a statewide coronavirus shutdown took effect and overall payrolls shrank for the first time in a decade, state officials reported Friday.
The March report showed a jobless rate of 5.3%, up from 3.9% in February, the largest jump in more than four decades of state data collection. But the rate is based on a survey ending March 12, so it doesn't reflect the positions axed by thousands of employers in the second half of the month.
In the first half of the month, the state lost 99,500 jobs. That ends a record 120-month streak of gains since the Great Recession.
The grim news came the day after federal officials reported that 660,966 Californians had filed jobless claims in the week that ended April 11. Over four weeks, 2.7 million claims were processed statewide, amounting to 1 of every 7 workers in the state's 19.3-million-person labor force.
The number of jobs lost in March was the fourth-largest on record, driven by declines in six of California's 11 industry sectors. The leisure and hospitality sector shrank the most _ losing 67,200 positions _ largely because of closures of hotels, restaurants, food services and bars.
The "other services" sector, which covers a mixture of businesses, lost 15,500 positions. The construction sector shrank by 11,600.
The government sector posted the largest job gain of the month: 5,200 positions, mostly caused by a rise in local government employment. Federal government also grew, boosted by the hiring of U.S. Census takers.
California employers with more than 75 workers must report plant closures and mass layoffs to the California Employment Development Department under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, law. In the past, the agency issued two monthly reports, but so many companies have been laying off workers that the list is now updated daily.
The numbers reveal a rapid acceleration. In February, just 64 companies reported layoffs, totaling 7,164 workers. In March, 354 companies reported staff cuts, totaling 52,959. And in the first half of April, 1,377 employers reported severing a combined 154,269 workers.
Thousands were laid off at hotels and restaurants alone, but pain has been felt across a wide variety of businesses. Among the largest layoffs were 3,029 at Pacific Dental Services, an Irvine-based chain; 2,250 at San Diego's Sea World; 1,671 at YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles; 1,331 at LAZ Parking in Los Angeles; 1,900 at Hawaiian Gardens Casino and 893 at San Diego-based Core Power Yoga.
And the WARN report is far from complete. Not only does it not include layoffs at smaller companies, but also it only counts workers who were employed for at least six of the 12 months before the layoffs. And last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom suspended the law's provision that employers give workers and the agency 60 days' notice, so many companies have yet to file reports.
