With a very solid month of broad-based job growth, metro Atlanta’s unemployment rate dipped from 5.5 percent to 5.4 percent in October, the state labor department said Thursday.
That is Atlanta’s lowest unemployment rate since the early days of the recession in 2008.
The unemployment rate has come down from 6.5 percent in October of last year. But Atlanta’s rate is still higher than the 5.0 percent national average. Here is what’s going on:
— It was the second-strongest month of job growth in the past ten years. From September to October, the number of jobs rose 32,400 in the region to total 2,628,000 in the metro area.
— The sectors that added employees included retail, leisure and hospitality and local government, as well as the corporate sector.
— There were only a few sectors with job losses, including some construction jobs as temperatures cooled as well as some architecture and engineering.
— Employers did lay off more people, part of that in construction cutbacks. There was an 8.1 percent increase in first-time claims for unemployment benefits for October, but that is down 12 percent from a year ago.
— Over the past year, metro Atlanta has added 88,100 jobs – that is 91 percent of the jobs added in Georgia.
Two bonus facts to make you sound smart at the Thanksgiving table:
1. There have been 94 months since 2007. The Atlanta jobless rate has been below the national average in just one of them.
2. The last time metro Atlanta’s jobless rate was below 5 percent was December, 2007 – the month that the recession began.
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