The unemployment rate in California, the most populous state in the United States, rocketed up by 0.6 percentage points in May - the largest one-month increase since the state began keeping records in 1976, a newspaper report said on Saturday.
This came as the fallout from high energy prices and the depressed housing market rippled through the state's economy, the San Francisco Chronicle said.
The state's jobless rate was a seasonally adjusted 6.8 percent, up from 6.2 percent in April, the paper said, quoting figures provided by the California Employment Development Department.
That is the highest rate since November 2003, when California was recovering from recession.
Meanwhile, the total number of jobs in the state outside the farm sector declined by 10,900 in May, the third month in a row that payrolls shrank. Construction accounted for most of those losses, shedding 9,600 jobs during the month.
Economists cautioned that California's exploding unemployment rate may have been a statistical fluke that exaggerated the extent of the damage to the state's labor market.
The labor force showed unusual growth during the month, possibly because of large numbers of graduates leaving school and looking for work, they said. That could have skewed the jobless rate because the new workers would have been classified as unemployed until they got hired.
Still, there is little question that the job market has been contracting and that the state is on the edge of recession, if not actually in one, experts said.
Source:Xinhua
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