More people working? Check.
Fewer people filing unemployment claims? Check.
Fewer people who have been unemployed long-term? Check.
Lower unemployment rate? Well …
Georgia’s jobless rate bottomed out in April at 6.9 percent. Since then it has gone up unexpectedly, and inexplicably, hitting 8.1 percent in August, according to figures released Thursday.
This sudden reversal was unexpected because other fundamentals — state revenue growth, job openings versus layoffs, personal income growth, population growth — have remained solid. It’s inexplicable because it runs counter to other employment figures.
Between April and August, non-farm jobs grew by 41,400, to the highest mark since June 2008. More than half of those jobs have been added just since July.
Likewise, unemployment claims are continuing a long downward trend. The number of people out of work for 27 weeks or more is down by more than 9,000 since April and more than 35,000 since a year ago.
Jobs were added in August in the private sector and the public sector, in goods-producing industries as well as service industries. Manufacturing and construction, two sectors hit hard by the Great Recession, continued their upward trend.
And yet, the number of people counted as out of work also rose. What’s going on?
Most likely, the operative word here is “counted.” To count as being unemployed in government statistics, you have to be actively looking for work. When you don’t think there’s any work to be found, you’re more likely to drop out of the labor force.
Georgia’s labor force since April has remained virtually flat after steadily rising. But keep in mind the labor-force figure also reflects people who move from one state to another, retire, return to school, etc. No single factor explains the entire change, and some of them offset one another.
Consider the last time Georgia’s unemployment rate was as high as 8.1 percent: exactly a year earlier, when it was 8.2 percent. The headline unemployment rate tells you things are virtually the same as a year ago. Yet, 79,300 more Georgians are working. And 4,370 fewer Georgians are unemployed.
The jobless rate may be the same, but it’s hard to dispute that a lot has changed for the better.
Job-market strength also shows up in places like the state’s coffers. The state reported income-tax withholding payments in August rose by 4.1 percent while sales tax receipts rose by 6.9 percent. Georgia also posted solid figures on both counts in June and July. These just aren’t the kind of real-time numbers that point to a slowing labor market or economy.
It’s worth pointing out that from 2011 to 2013, Georgia’s unemployment rate for August was eventually revised downward by an average of 0.3 percentage points, while our rate for July was revised downward by an average of 0.2 points. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t release its recalculations for this summer until next year.
The old adage is that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, while a depression is when you lose yours. If either of those things is happening with much frequency, we ought to notice it between press releases from the Labor Department.
