Atlanta's Unemployment Rate Down in September: ICYMI

September’s unemployment rate in the City of Atlanta edged closer to the six percent mark and decreased from August’s figure, data released from the Georgia Department of Labor on Thursday shows.

Atlanta’s unemployment rate between August and September dropped from 6.3 to 6.1 percent, according to preliminary unemployment figures for August. There were 230,648 people in Atlanta’s workforce in September, compared to 230,788 in August. Furthermore, only 14,149 Atlanta residents were unemployed in September, compared to 14,498 in August. In September of 2014, Atlanta’s unemployment rate was 7.5 percent.

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August and September’s statewide unemployment rate of 5.8 percent was the lowest such rate in Georgia since May of 2008, Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said last month in a statement. At this time last year, Georgia’s unemployment rate sat at 6.9 percent.

Employers created 9,100 new jobs in September, more than one and a half times the average number of jobs created between August and September during the last three years, Butler said earlier this month. In total, employers have created over 80,000 new jobs this year.

September’s strongest job creators were state and local governments, as public schools reopened. Some 5,400 new jobs were created in those sectors, according to GDOL data released last week. The total number of jobs in the state increased by 0.2 percent in September, and were a 2 percent increase in the number of jobs in Georgia in September of 2014.

The number of initial claims for unemployment insurance, a measure of new layoffs, rose by 593 or 2.3 percent, to 26,928 in September, mostly due to an increase in temporary claims filed in manufacturing. GDOL said that despite the uptick in new layoffs, the number of layoffs so far this year is down 10.8 percent from the number of layoffs between January and September of 2014.