The unemployment rate in Georgia dropped last month:
Georgia’s unemployment rate fell to 9.9 percent in November from 10.2 percent in October — the largest one-month decline in 34 years, the state labor department said Thursday.
The increase of 22,400 jobs was broader than just holiday hiring, the labor department said.
“We had the best November since 2007 for retail hiring, while seeing gains in the financial and business sectors,” Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said in a statement. “These two sectors have been hit very hard by the recession. This is encouraging news.”
The number of jobs rose 0.6 percent to 3,838,700 in November. In addition to retail, financial and business services, there were more jobs in education and health care.
Despite the gains, Georgia has 19,900 fewer jobs than in November of last year, when the unemployment rate was 10.4 percent, the labor department said.
This is certainly encouraging, but last month’s numbers nationally weren’t all that great as the drop in the unemployment rate really had to do with more people leaving the labor market entirely. As Conn Carroll noted at the Washington Examiner, the “jobless rate counts only people who are actively looking for work.” So when you remove a chunk of people — in this case, 315,000 — from the number of the unemployed — again, not because they found work, the unemployment rate will only go down. That’s basic math, but it won’t be the lede in many stories.
And as we see, Georgia has fewer jobs currently than at this point last year; so the trend in that regard is similar here.
