Slight dip in L.A. area jobless rate

Unlike the L.A. County report from a couple of weeks ago, this reading looks at the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metro area, and it shows an April unemployment rate of 11.3 percent, down from 11.7 percent the previous month. That's encouraging compared with other parts of the state (11 of the 14 areas with jobless rates of at least 15 percent were in California), but don't expect the L.A. number to fall too much further. Here's the release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. May's U.S. employment report comes out on Friday, and economist Mark Zandi projects an addition of 575,000 jobs. That would be the largest number of jobs created in any month since 2000. But Zandi expects only 150,000 of them to come from the private sector. The rest are temporary Census hires.

Here are the April unemployment rates in California. Note the huge variations.

Bakersfield-Delano.................... 16.5%
Chico................................. 13.9%
El Centro............................. 27.9%
Fresno................................16.9%
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana......11.3%
Modesto...............................18.3%
Napa..................................10.0%
Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura..........10.5%
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario......14.2%
Sacramento--Arden-Arcade--Roseville...12.4%
San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos.........10.4%
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont.........10.5%
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara........11.7%
San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles...........10.0%
Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta......8.8%
Stockton..............................17.7%
Yuba City.............................20.3%