GA Unemployment Rate Holds Steady in September

Georgia’s unemployment rate held steady between the months of August and September at 5.8 percent, the Georgia Department of Labor announced Thursday.

August’s unemployment rate of under six 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.

Looking for a job? Visit Buckhead Patch’s Jobs Board to find the latest openings.

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 Thursday. 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 Thursday. 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.

Jobless rates for metro areas, cities and counties are due next week.

Butler urged job seekers to use the GDOL’s job listing service, www.employgeorgia.com, where 66,845 jobs were posted throughout the state in September.