Metro Atlanta jobless rate hits 16-year high

The jobless rate in metro Atlanta jumped last month to 6.3 percent, its highest level in 16 years.

A year ago, the metro Atlanta rate was 4.6 percent.

That local increase — not surprisingly — echoed the jump in statewide joblessness announced last week by the Georgia Labor Department. The two measures tend to move in parallel, because Atlanta represents nearly 60 percent of Georgia’s work force.

State unemployment in July was 6.2 percent, and Georgia payrolls shrank by about 46,600 jobs from June to July, according to the Labor Department.

Officials have seen a surge of laid-off workers filing for jobless benefits and looking for help finding another job, said state Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond.

“We are experiencing a rising tide of unemployment not seen in Georgia in more than fifteen years,” he said.

New jobless claims in metro Atlanta last month were 34 percent higher than the same month a year earlier, and statewide claims were up at roughly the same rate, according to the Labor Department.

Metro Atlanta’s unemployment rate was 5.9 percent in June.

The official jobless rate has been climbing for more than a year. In the spring of 2007, the metro Atlanta rate was 3.9 percent. That had marked the lowest level of joblessness since 2001, when the rate had slipped to 3.6 percent.

Then that year’s recession took hold. The unemployment rate climbed steadily, cresting at 5.6 percent in mid-2003, before renewed hiring began to chip away at the labor market.

The jobless rate declined, although it never approached the lows it reached during the go-go technology era: In 2000, joblessness in metro Atlanta fell as low as 2.6 percent.

Calculation of the benchmark jobless rate is done without counting Georgians who take part-time work because they cannot find a full-time job or those who have stopped looking for work.