Georgia’s unemployment rate ticked down to 5.6 percent in November despite a marked slowdown in job growth, the labor department said Thursday.
That rate, the lowest since the summer of 2008, came as the economy added 3,700 jobs in a range of sectors, including leisure and hospitality, corporate services and construction.
During the past 12 months, Georgia’s economy has added 92,900 jobs, trimming the unemployment rate from 6.7 percent, said Mark Butler, labor commissioner for the state.
“We have had a very good year as far as job growth goes,” said Butler, noting the state’s 2.2 percent growth rate. “Georgia continues to grow jobs faster than the nation, which has a 1.9 percent growth rate.”
But annual growth was stronger in 2014, and November hiring fell sharply from the previous two months.
Still, the state added 46,200 jobs in the past three months – the strongest autumn of job growth since 1994.
The dip in unemployment also came despite an apparent rise in the number of layoffs.
New claims for unemployment insurance were up 14 percent during the month and 18 percent from the same month a year ago. Butler discounted those numbers as temporary, due to cuts in manufacturing that can be reversed.
“A lot of those individuals laid off last month have already gone back to work,” he said.
The Labor Department report came a day after the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate for the first time in nine years.
That increase – which is expected to be followed by others – will add to the cost of borrowing money. Higher rates can eventually crimp economic growth, but the Fed argued that it wants to head off inflation and believes that the labor market has become relatively tight.
In Georgia, the jobless rate has slowly fallen from a high of 10.5 percent, although it is not quite back to the 5.0 percent just before the recession. And after five years of job growth, the state has not completely made up the ground lost during the recession.
Job growth has been solid: The state has nearly 140,000 more jobs than at the start of the recession in late 2007. Yet a separate survey shows fewer people are employed. While the data is not precise, that mismatch implies that many of the jobs are low-paying or part-time and that many Georgians are working more than one.
The number of unemployed Georgians has dropped dramatically. But 265,000 are still out of work and searching for a job – and that does not include those who have given up the search.
More troubling, the share of long-time job-seekers is still historically high: 39 percent of all officially jobless.
Georgia’s unemployment rate has been higher than the national average since October 2007.
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