California added more than 40,000 jobs last month, according to new state figures out Friday. But it lost nearly 15,000 jobs the month before.
California’s 41,500 job increase in October is nearly 20 percent of what the entire nation added. But the state also revised September’s job loss even lower - to 14,200.
“We get these zigzags in job reports, which it is shows it’s not consistently moving in the right direction,” says Chapman University economist Esmael Adibi. He attributes at least some of the fluctuation to sampling errors as the state makes seasonal adjustments to the workforce numbers.
Still, California’s job growth is barely keeping up with the natural growth in the state’s labor force. “What we want to see is job creation, the growth rate, to be faster than growth in labor force, to bring unemployment down significantly,” Adibi says. “And we’re not seeing that yet.”
California’s unemployment rate in October held steady at 7.3 percent.
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