The unemployment rate in Northeast Georgia was down for the month of April. The Georgia Department of Labor released the numbers Thursday.
“The jobs report is in for Northeast Georgia and in that report we saw that the unemployment rate dropped five-tenths of a point bringing the local rate down to three percent.”
The good news continued with the number of employed residents increasing last month, but Labor Commissioner Mark Butler says the latest figures show room for improvement.
“Now when we take a look at those numbers to cause the rate to drop, the most significant number that we saw was actually an area of concern, and that is we did the number of individuals in the labor force drop significantly by about 34-hundred individuals,” according to Butler. “The reason why that is of such concern has to do with the fact that these are individuals that are no longer looking for work and we have a lot of job openings right now in Northeast Georgia.”
The labor force includes both those who are employed and those who are looking for jobs.
Butler says just in the last month, Employ Georgia.com, the state’s job listing website showed thousands of jobs open.
“We saw over 36-hundred active jobs listings over just the last 30 days, so we need to encourage more individuals to get back into the workforce to take a look at these current job listings. So when you combine the fact that we have a lot of jobs and fewer people looking, we have a very tight labor market right now in Northeast Georgia.”
The Northeast region ended April with 293,204 employed residents, that’s up slightly when compared to last April.
