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The unemployment rate fell to 5.3 percent, down a tenth of a point from the month before, the Employment Development Department said. It was the lowest statewide unemployment rate since June 2007.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 160,000 in April, the weakest gain since September, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate held steady at 5%, but the share of Americans participating in the labor force dipped after earlier signs of stabilization.

However, a new analysis of employment data by the Legislature’s budget adviser suggests that when the underemployed and labor force dropouts are added to the official number, job distress affects nearly three times as many Californians.

A week after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15 minimum wage boost into law, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees announcing that 500 jobs were getting cut. . . Last year, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced plans to boost its minimum wage to $15 at the start of next school year, independent of the state law. Since UC Berkeley was already in financial trouble — it ran a $109 million deficit last year and is projecting a deficit of $150 million this year — number crunchers there had to have factored in the higher mandated wage when making their layoff decisions.

California still has a higher rate of unemployment than the nation, at 5%, a sign that labor markets are still struggling in some parts of the state. Job growth was hampered by employment cuts in several industries, including high-paying fields such as professional and business services.

A continuing storyline of the California economy is the enormous job creation and job destruction that goes on below the surface of the monthly job numbers. Each month around 300,000 payroll jobs are destroyed, and an equal amount created, even as the monthly payroll job total moves only a little.

However, on one metric the employment situation remains stubborn: long-term unemployment. The share of unemployed persons stuck without a job for 27 weeks or longer is 28 percent, as opposed to 19 percent pre-recession. That is down somewhat from 37 percent when the economy was at peak unemployment, but still worryingly high.

Treating workers as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded is a central part of the revised relationship between employers and employees that techies proclaim is an innovation as important as chips and software. The model originated in Silicon Valley, but it’s spreading. Old-guard companies are hiring “growth hackers” and building “incubators,” too. They see Silicon Valley as a model of enlightenment and forward thinking, even though this “new” way of working is actually the oldest game in the world: the exploitation of labor by capital. . . The Netflix code has been emulated by countless other companies, including HubSpot, which employed a metric called VORP, or value over replacement player. This brutal idea comes from the world of baseball, where it is used to set prices on players.

In all, up to 450 sewers, auxiliary workers and supervisors will be laid off from American Apparel facilities in Garden Grove, downtown Los Angeles and South Gate, said Nativo Lopez, an adviser with the General Brotherhood of Workers of American Apparel. The Garden Grove plant is at 12641 Industry St.

The U.S. economy needs to add 145,000 jobs per month just to hold the unemployment rate steady and absorb the flow of new workers into the labor force, according to estimates in the latest Wall Street Journal survey of economists.

The State of California added 19,600 private sector jobs during the month of March

More Americans were hired to start a new job in February than in any month since before the recession that began in 2007—about 5.4 million people.

The Employment Development Department said the statewide unemployment rate fell by two-tenths of a point, to 5.5 percent. Employers added 39,900 jobs during February, compared with a loss of 4,000 jobs in January.

More top corporate leaders said they expect to cut employment at their firms in the next six months than add jobs, according to the Business Roundtable’s first-quarter CEO Economic Outlook Survey, released Tuesday. The group’s members are chief executives at the country’s largest firms.

The jobless rate declined or held steady in all but nine states in the 12 months through January, the Labor Department said Monday. Nationally, the rate fell eight-tenths of a percentage point to 4.9% over the year. Of the states that saw their unemployment rates increase, most are closely tied economically to energy production.