Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer – The recession continued to punish California as employers cut 66,500 jobs in June to put the state at an unemployment rate of 11.6 percent, the nation’s sixth highest.
A report issued Friday by the Employment Development Department in Sacramento also hints at how the state budget deficit will affect California, which lost 6,700 government jobs in June.

“That’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Stephen Levy with the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.

Levy said layoffs and furloughs of state workers will worsen the state economy, which has already been hit harder than the nation as a whole by the collapse of the housing bubble.

The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.5 percent. Michigan has the nation’s highest rate of 15.2 percent.

The state’s unemployment rate in May was 11.6 percent, officials said Friday, correcting the 11.5 percent figure they had reported last month.

Friday’s report held no good news for the Bay Area’s three major metropolitan regions.

Unemployment now stands at 11.8 percent in metropolitan San Jose, which consists of Santa Clara and San Benito counties. The two counties have lost more than 15,000 manufacturing jobs in the last year.

Metropolitan San Francisco, which includes Marin and San Mateo counties, continued to have the best showing in bad times with a June unemployment rate of 9.2 percent. But the West Bay has been losing jobs in retail and professional and business services.

In metropolitan Oakland, which encompasses Alameda and Contra Costa counties, job cuts in construction contributed to a June unemployment rate of 11.1 percent.

Chris Thornberg, a California analyst with Beacon Economics, said job losses in the state seem to be slowing, but he does not expect hiring to come back strongly.

“Jobless recovery is a term you’re going to be hearing a lot,” he said.

One early indicator of a labor market turnaround is a spike in temporary employment, but that barometer seems flat, according to Rob Parker, director of the professional services group of the Spherion staffing agency.

“We’re not seeing the mass layoffs we had been, but we’re also not seeing any major pickup in hiring in California and the Bay Area,” he said.

The Employment Development Department estimates that more than 2 million Californians were unemployed in June and for some the situation is growing desperate.

Elk Grove (Sacramento County) resident Sharon Taylor said she has been out of work since she lost a call-center job in November 2007. She took classes to get retrained as a medical assistant but says there is so much competition for jobs that employers are hiring only people with experience.

“Someone told me recently just to start volunteering to get experience,” said Taylor, adding that unemployment checks have allowed her to rent a room and keep her car. But her last extension runs out at the end of August.

“When that happens, then what?” she said.

E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.