SACRAMENTO — Unemployment in California rose for a fifth straight month to 7.7% in August, and economists predicted that a recovery wouldn't come soon, given the depth of the Wall Street financial crisis.
It was the highest rate in just over 12 years and was tied with Mississippi's as the third worst in the nation. Nationally, unemployment was 6.1% in August.
The rate jumped from a revised 7.4% posted for July and from 5.5% a year earlier, the California Employment Development Department reported Friday.
The state's 17-million-person workforce lost 60,000 salaried and self-employed jobs from July to August and lost 240,000 jobs since August 2007.
"The self-employed are really feeling the pain," said Esmael Adibi, an economist at Chapman University in Orange.
Fixing what he called the "real economy" of California -- made up of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses -- could be much more difficult than calming Wall Street with a proposed government bailout, he said.
"The real economy is like a ship. Whatever is going to turn it around is going to take a long time," Adibi said.
Peggy Mathison, a 20-year veteran of the Southern California mortgage industry, knows something about patience in tough times. She's been looking for a job since being laid off as a $44-an-hour independent contractor a year ago.
Now she's struggling along with her husband, a home landscape contractor, and two grown sons to hold on to their Yorba Linda home.
"We're down to the wire on making our mortgage payments, and that unemployment check is something we depend on," Mathison said.
Her husband "has gone back to using his tools" as a freelancer, she said, and that's "hit or miss."
Mathison's problems are emblematic of the tough times sweeping neighborhoods across the state as companies lay off workers, homeowners watch their equity shrink or disappear and 401(k) retirement funds plummet in value, said Stephen Levy, director and senior economist at the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.
"The unemployment numbers are a stark reminder that the economic downturn, the recession, was here before the Wall Street crisis, and will be here after the Wall Street crisis," Levy said. "Folks are a lot less wealthy."
