Georgia unemployment rate stalls in May
After 10 straight months of decline, Georgia’s unemployment rate remained flat at 8.9 percent in May, the state Labor Department reported Thursday.
The employment status quo isn’t necessarily unexpected, though. Nearly every spring, as school lets out and tens of thousands of Georgians search for summertime jobs, the unemployment rate barely budges or rises slightly.
Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said that, despite the ho-hum report, Georgia actually added 16,400 jobs between April and May. In all, Georgia tallied 3,944,900 jobs, the most since December 2008.
“We now have the fewest jobless workers receiving unemployment insurance benefits since the start of the recession in 2007,” Butler said. “And the numbers of new layoffs and long-term unemployed are down.”
A year ago, the state’s unemployment rate stood at 9.8 percent. Nationwide, it’s 8.2 percent.
Just as the days warm and the flowers bloom, Georgia’s unemployment rate moves almost imperceptibly each spring. Between 2000 and 2007, for example, each May the rate stayed the same or ticked up 0.1 percent. In the midst of the recession, 2008 and 2009, it rose 0.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For the past two years, though, it has remained flat.
Georgia has added 34,000 jobs since May 2011. Accountants and other business service jobs, as well as truck drivers and warehouse workers, made up the bulk of the new hires while construction workers and schoolteachers languished.
Fortunately,” Butler said, “the growth is in some of our key industries.”
Another positive trend: The number of long-term unemployed workers decreased by 3,600 in May to 236,900. But they still make up 55.7 percent of all unemployed Georgians.
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