SACRAMENTO AND LOS ANGELES — Unemployment in California shot to 11.2% in March, the highest level since the state began keeping records. What's more, the number of people out of work for almost a year rose by 9.4%, and has now doubled in the last 12 months.
Carpenter Luiz Vasquez knows the frustration all too well. In the last year, he said, he worked only two weeks.
"I go through town, and I do not hear the sound of work," said Vasquez, 40, who is seeking help through a Chrysalis job center in Santa Monica. "I do not hear a single hammer strike."
The state's economy has been particularly hard on construction workers like Vasquez. The downturn started in housing and has spread to retailing, international trade, finance and nearly every other sector.
An average of 211,000 Californians have been unemployed for more than 47 weeks over the last year, the state reported. These people now account for about 14% of California's approximately 1.5 million jobless.
The plight of the long-term unemployed such as Vasquez is characteristic of the deepening recession that has gripped the global economy and the Golden State since at least December 2007.
"This recession has features of a depression," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at UC Santa Barbara. "We get these very long-time people being out of work. They sort of disappear to a never-never land."
California lost 62,100 jobs in March, state officials reported Friday. In all, 637,400 jobs have disappeared in the last year and a total of 727,700 since the economy peaked in July 2007.
Despite the gloom, last month's loss was much smaller than the 114,000 posted in February, said Howard Roth, chief economist at the California Department of Finance.
"We're losing jobs at a slower rate. That's sort of the first step" toward recovery, he said.
The state has been scrambling to assist the unemployed with mixed success. The California unemployment insurance fund is insolvent and being bailed out with billions of dollars in federal money. The Employment Development Department's obsolete computer system and telephone call centers are swamped with hundreds of thousands of claims.
On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an emergency proclamation designed to speed the hiring of 150 staffers to help ease the logjam.
