The November California jobs report showed the unemployment rate subsiding a bit from 12.5 percent in October to 12.3 percent, the result of a declining workforce and not a result of new jobs. The year-on-year job growth comparison showed that non-farm job level was 4.2 percent less than last November, better than the 4.6 percent loss in October. The November seasonally-adjusted month on month non-farm job growth rate, which is a volatile measure, was minus 0.9 percent. Charts are shown below.

As with the United States, these results are slight improvements from October’s results but we are not out of the woods yet. This is not even enough to suspect that things are improving. Our assessment of this data is that we are bumping along the bottom of this cycle.

The bumping along bottom may last a while. Public sector job losses worsened in September and this has been a maintained pattern for three months now. This data is shown in the last chart below. We suspect the job-cuts that the State will have to perform to manage its current and future deficits will get substantially worse than they have been to date and that this will imply worse public sector job losses during the next year. Even if the private sector improves during the next few months, the worsening public sector job market could offset many of those gains.