Coming Sunday: Jobs are slowing returning to Georgia since the recession ended five years ago, but wages haven't rebounded. A new report puts Georgia's mid-sized cities near the bottom of the national wage scale.
Georgia’s unemployment rate rose for the third straight month to 7.8 percent in July, a disappointing yet not wholly unexpected increase that should reverse itself next month as laid-off seasonal workers find jobs.
Georgia has one of the nation’s highest jobless rates, trailing only Michigan, Nevada, Mississippi and Rhode Island, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) records. The U.S. rate is 6.2 percent and has barely budged the past four months.
State labor officials caution that the July jump, from 7.4 percent in June, reflects the seasonal nature of work in Georgia, where privately contracted bus drivers and cafeteria workers, as well as some factory workers, are laid off for the summer. Most states’ rates fluctuate seasonally, though not as markedly as Georgia’s. Bus drivers, for example, are paid year-round in many states.
“Due to the temporary nature of those layoffs, most of those individuals have gone back to work,” labor commissioner Mark Butler said in a videotaped news release Thursday.
Alice Young hasn’t. A temporary job in Douglasville that she thought would last through September ended Aug. 1. Young, 52, applied Thursday for another seasonal job at a Carrollton warehouse.
Seasonal jobs “are kind of a tease,” said Young, who helps support a retired husband, daughter and four grandchildren. “They get people used to that kind of money coming in and then, all of a sudden, it’s gone.”
The state jobless rate was 8.3 percent a year ago, so Georgia continues to make some post-recession progress. An additional 83,300 jobs — three-fourths across Metro Atlanta — have been created since July 2013, according to the labor department.
Typically during an economic recovery, more and more people are encouraged by job prospects and rejoin the labor force. In June, the state said, nearly 5,000 Georgians dropped out of the job market, a discouraging sign and the first decrease this year.
In addition, 43,000 people applied for first-time unemployment insurance in July, a 13 percent increase from June. Factory workers — some mill owners and other manufacturers still close a week or two each summer — accounted for one-third of the increase, the labor department said.
The state has lost jobs — anywhere from 6,500 to 40,200 — every May and June for the last 10 years, according to labor department statistics. Nearly 13,000 jobs disappeared this past June, mostly “educational service” jobs, like bus and cafeteria workers.
“You get seasonal peaks and valleys in demand for workers largely associated with school systems and universities, but also with manufacturing too,” said University of Georgia economist Jeff Humphreys. “And during the winter months, you have a surge in employment in November and December associated with retail. But then we have a seasonal drop in retail after the Christmas holidays.”
Matthew Dotson, a BLS economist in Atlanta, crunched employment numbers for the last decade and discovered that educational hiring resumes whenever school starts. Metro Atlanta, for example, has seen an average employment gain of 1.7 percent for August and 2.4 percent for September.
Katie Burgess epitomizes the overall seasonal trend. The Bremen mother just started a wrapping job at HoneyBaked Ham ($7.50 an hour) that is supposed to last into December.
“I’d prefer a full-time job; it doesn’t matter where,” said Burgess, 30, applying for a warehouse job Thursday at the state employment office in Carrollton. “I’ll just keep putting in applications and maybe I’ll get something full-time.”
A survey of neighboring states shows that, on the whole, their unemployment rates go up during the summer too. Georgia may have higher rate jumps than the Carolinas and Alabama, but, over the last decade, each state usually saw an uptick in joblessness in May and June.
Humphreys, the UGA economist, considers quarterly or annual numbers a better guide. He recently upgraded his job growth predictions for Georgia.
Last year, for example, the annual unemployment rate averaged 8.2 percent. This year, it should drop to 7.3 percent before falling to 6.7 percent next year.
“By the middle of next year we will have recovered all the jobs lost in the Great Recession,” Humphreys said. “But our labor market is healing a little more slowly than the rest of the nation. I’m disappointed the housing recovery isn’t stronger.”
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