L.A. Manufacturing Continues to Slide

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L.A. County’s overall manufacturing base continues to lose ground, although the struggling durable goods sector fared a bit better.


Overall, the January employment report shows that the county had 475,600 manufacturing jobs, down from 478,200 the previous month and 538,000 in January 2002, according to the state’s Employment Development Department.


The manufacturing numbers were reported along with the month’s jobless figures, which showed that the county’s unemployment rate was 6.3 percent, down from 6.9 percent a year ago and 6.4 percent in December.


“The direction from almost any perspective is good if the unemployment number is going down,” said David Lewin, senior associate dean of MBA programs at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.


One bright spot in the sector came in the manufacture of durable goods, which accounted for 266,100 jobs in January, a slip from the year earlier of only 0.4 percent.


“In Southern California manufacturing, the durable sector is showing signs of life, while non-durable goods is being hurt by competition from low-cost producers such as China,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.


And despite the imminent demise of big projects like Boeing Co.’s 717, aerospace employment was up in January to 40,500 jobs, a 2.8 percent gain over the year earlier.


But Lewin was more wary of those numbers, saying that the reliance on defense spending to bolster the county’s aerospace base was problematic. “When you get aerospace employment increasing, and you know it’s not due to growth in commercial aviation, it’s basically a subsidy,” he said. “And defense is volatile, it goes up and down a lot.”


Meanwhile, the apparel sector continued to hemorrhage jobs, dropping more than 6,000 workers from its rolls in January, a 9.4 percent decline for the like period a year earlier.


Employment in the furniture fabrication sector slipped 4.1 percent from a year earlier, to 25,800 jobs, and employment in computers and electronics was down 0.5 percent to 58,800 jobs.

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