Job growth continued in Georgia but a steady stream of new job-seekers hoping to find opportunities kept the unemployment rate at 6.3 percent in April, state officials said Thursday.
It was the third consecutive month at 6.3 percent unemployment. A year ago, the jobless rate was 7.3 percent.
The state’s economy added 121,900 jobs in those 12 months – the largest April-to-April job growth in 16 years, according to Mark Butler, Georgia labor commissioner. “We did very well over the year.”
The economy added 7,400 jobs during the month, the state reported.
All employment sectors grew, with the strongest expansion coming from trade, transportation and warehousing, which added 31,800 jobs.
Three other sectors also expanded at better than a 3 percent pace: leisure and hospitality, professional and business services and education and health.
With company demand for skilled workers on the rise, the Labor Department has launched a Web site that lists “several hundred thousand job openings across the state,” Butler said: The site is www.EmployGeorgia.com/.
On Wednesday, two economists who track the metro economy gave upbeat projections for the next year, although they see annual job growth cooling. In separate forecasts, Mark Vitner of Wells Fargo and Rajeev Dhawan of Georgia State predicted solid growth for the rest of 2015 and into the next several years.
The state will add nearly 100,000 jobs and see the unemployment rate continue to slide during 2015, Dhawan said.
Still, the damage done to the labor market by the 2007-09 recession has not yet been fully repaired.
Georgia has 195,486 fewer people in the labor force now than in August of 2008 – despite nearly seven years of population growth.
The number of people employed in Georgia, 172,564, also is smaller than it was at the peak seven years ago.
At the same time, the number of jobs is higher than before the recession: Many people have more than one position – often not in the field for which they trained.
Melani Carter, 25, of Lithonia, graduated from Kennesaw State University with a degree in communications. She has been working with a local broadcast company, but the job is seasonal so for the summer she’s going to work part-time for a hospital on their online registrations.
“I don’t like balancing multiple jobs, but I find that a lot of my friends are doing that,” she said.
And the proportion of the jobless who are long-term unemployed has barely dipped in the past year. State officials say 41.2 percent of the jobless have been looking for work at least six months.
Yet progress is unmistakable and, ironically, that may be the reason that the unemployment rate is not falling faster.
Jobless workers are not counted as officially employed unless they are actively seeking work. But as hiring improves, some people who had given up return to the job search.
Last month, the number of new claims for unemployment insurance – which generally signals the level of layoffs – last month fell to its lowest level since June of 2000, Butler said. Moreover, one-quarter of those people were being laid off temporarily.
The number of unemployed in the state has fallen to 298,643, down more than 47,000 from a year ago.
Metro Atlanta continued to account for more than half the job growth in Georgia, officials said. April data for metro Atlanta are due out next week.
State job numbers are adjusted to account for seasonal patterns. The April data for metro Atlanta figures are not seasonally adjusted.
About the Author
