Georgia’s jobless rate held steady in February at 5.4 percent as the economy added 11,900 jobs, the state Labor Department announced today.
While not exactly an all-out sprint, the month’s hiring kept up the positive momentum and provided another sign that the economy has not stumbled coming into the new year despite stock market and global woes.
The unemployment rate is down from 6.2 percent a year ago, with 116,000 new jobs added since then, according to Mark Butler, state labor commissioner.
“Our strong over-the-year job growth continues to outpace the national average,” he said.
Georgia has added jobs in 13 consecutive months, and in 23 of the last 24.
The past year’s growth was not as strong as the year before, but it was better than any other February-to-February growth since the 1990s.
Leading sectors for job growth during the month were logistics and warehousing, as well as the corporate category.
Hiring was strong enough to hold the jobless rate steady even while the labor force grew by more than 17,000. That growth is seen as another positive, because when jobs were scarce, many people left the workforce – some going to school or taking early retirement, some just too discouraged to keep searching for work.
Now, as the labor force grows, it is seen as a sign that some of those people are being lured back into the job hunt by the promise of a paycheck.
If the state economy has an Achilles’ heel, it might be the size of those paychecks: many workers have gone years without a boost to their buying power – a stress that many observers have blamed for the anger and frustration seen during the current political season.
And while much of the public discussion has been about raising the minimum wage, the middle class has also suffered income stagnation for years, according to a recent report from the Atlanta Regional Commission.
In an online post this morning, economist Mark Vitner of Wells Fargo wrote of today’s report: “Like the nation, a large proportion of Georgia’s job growth in February came from industries that tend to pay relatively low wages and employ many part-time workers.”
Only in the past few months of this long recovery has there been evidence of wage hikes that might outbid inflation.
Usually, a recovery leads to wage hikes as the labor market tightens. This recovery has grown long in the tooth without having spurred solid pay hikes – and even with a falling jobless rate, Georgia has a large pool of jobseekers.
About 261,200 people are jobless and searching for work, the Labor Department said.
Unemployment is way down from the worst of the post-recession job crisis, when nearly a half-million Georgians were unemployed. Yet it is still not back to the pre-recession levels – and a historically high percentage of the jobless have been out of work more than six months: more than 101,000, according to the Labor Department.
Still, the growth has been strong enough so that some skills are now in short supply.
In construction, for instance, work has rebounded sharply since evaporating during the recession, said Dan Smith, chief financial officer of New South Construction.
The number of construction jobs is nowhere near what it was at the peak in 2007, but it has grown 24 percent in the past three years.
“Compared to a couple years ago, it is like night and day,” Smith said. “Now, it’s a struggle to find people, to find the right people.”
The 190-employee company hired about 30 workers last year, positions that ranged from senior project managers to laborers, he said.
So far this year, New South has added eight or nine and expects hiring to roughly match last year’s hiring, he said. “As you can tell by looking around, construction is booming again. There’s so much pent-up demand left over from the downturn.”
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