Georgia's economic recovery is at a virtual standstill, at least as measured by the jobless rate.
Seasonal cuts in school employment offset modest hiring in construction and services to send the state unemployment rate up a tick to 9.9 percent, the state Labor Department said Thursday.
That was up from 9.8 percent in May and barely changed from a June 2010, when it was 10 percent.
Georgia's jobless rate has exceeded the national rate for 47 straight months.
“The unemployment rate inched up slightly (in June) because of normal seasonal factors, primarily involving the end of the school year,” state Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said in a statement.
“Non-contract school workers, such as bus drivers, lunchroom and janitorial workers, are usually laid-off during the summer school break," Butler said. "Also, new graduates began searching for jobs and are counted as unemployed while doing so.”
On the positive side, there were increases of 2,900 construction jobs and 2,400 in the service industries, the labor department said.
Another hopeful note for hiring: Lee Whetstone, president of FutureStaff, a staffing firm with offices in Newnan and Conyers, said requests from employers were up 33 percent between January and June 2011 compared with the same period a year ago.
"We started pickup up in April of last year, and except for some softening this past May, business has been strong," Whetstone said. "Historically, the staffing industry is a leading indicator of the economy, and I believe that it will get better."
That's the kind of news Missy Poole said she wants to hear. Poole, of Newnan, looked for a job for nine months after graduating with a master's in education and organizational leadership from Vanderbilt University in May 2010. She landed a temporary job earlier this year at Yokogawa Corp. of America, an information technology and manufacturing firm in Newnan, after signing on with FutureStaff.
While she is working fulltime at Yokogawa, she'd be very interested if it turned into a permanent position, especially knowing how difficult it is to find jobs.
"It's not what my degree is in, but there are tangible skills that I am learning that I can take to other jobs" or use here, she said of her position as a project documentation coordinator.
While still very high, the number of long-term unemployed workers declined for the fourth consecutive month. There were 250,500 Georgians out of work for at least 27 weeks — down five-tenths of a percentage point from May. But, the number of long-term unemployed remains 8.9 percent higher than in June of last year.
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