By the numbers
7.2 percent - Georgia's jobless rate in November, down from preliminary 7.7 percent in October6.8 percent - Tennessee's jobless rate in November, down from 7.1 percent in October5.8 percent - U.S. jobless rate in November. unchanged from the previous monthSources: Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development, Georgia Department of Labor
Tennessee and Georgia are adding jobs this year at a faster pace than the nation as a whole, but both states continued to have unemployment rates above the U.S. average again in November.
The jobless rate in Georgia dropped by the biggest monthly amount in 38 years last month, falling a half of a percent to 7.2 percent. In Tennessee, unemployment dropped during November by three-tenths of a percentage point to 6.8 percent -- the lowest rate since June.
"This continues the pattern that started in August with Tennessee's rate falling faster than the U.S. as a whole," said Bill Fox, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee. "We're seeing consistent growth now -- and the drop in oil prices should only help in that recovery."
Nonetheless, state economists still expect Tennessee and Georgia to have elevated jobless rates compared with the U.S. as a whole during at least the first part of 2015.
"This is now the third straight month in which we've seen a pretty good drop in unemployment so I think we have a definite trend here," said Jeff Humphreys, an economist at the University of Georgia at Athens. "We expect job growth in Georgia to be above the U.S. rate through 2015 and the unemployment rate to be at about 6.5 percent by the end of the year."
Such a jobless rate would remain well above the 5.8 percent U.S. jobless rate for last month. But Humphreys said Georgia "was one of the hardest hit states in the country from the Great Recession and we're having to dig out of a pretty deep hole."
Tennessee employment over the past year has grown by 1.9 percent, or 53,900 jobs, to a record high. Georgia's job growth has been even faster at 2.4 percent with the addition of 98,800 jobs over the past year, but remains below its all-time peak prior to the recession.
"This is the largest monthly rate decrease we have seen in Georgia going all the way back to 1976," Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said Thursday in announcing the newest jobless numbers. "We had more jobs in November than we've had since the beginning of the Great Recession, and our November-to-November job growth was the largest in nine years."
The number of jobless claims filed in Georgia last month fell to the lowest point in 14 years, Butler said.
So far, the decline in unemployment doesn't appear to be doing much to boost worker pay. But both Fox and Humphreys said the unemployment rate is reaching an inflection point where additional declines in the number of unemployed persons in the workforce could begin to bid up wages for those with jobs.
In October, the most recent month for which data is available, average manufacturing wages in Tennessee were $17.39 an hour, down 15 cents an hour from the previous month.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 757-6340.