The jobless rate declined last month in Chattanooga and Cleveland, Tenn., but unemployment rose in metropolitan Dalton, Ga., during August to the highest rate of any metro area in Georgia or Tennessee.
Dalton, the self-proclaimed Carpet Capital of the World, continued to suffer from the sputtering housing recovery last month. Unemployment rose again last month in Whitfield and Murray counties to push the jobless rate in metropolitan Dalton up by three-tenths of a percent to 10.7 percent.
The Georgia Department of Labor said the Dalton area shed 200 jobs over the past year even as the size of the workforce continued to grow. The number of initial claims for unemployment insurance, which is a measure of new layoffs, increased by 15.7 percent last month in Dalton, primarily due to the increase in claims from displaced manufacturing workers.
After two years of strong recovery from the 2009-2010 recession, the housing recovery has taken a pause over the past year or so in many U.S. markets. With fewer new home starts and more consumers shifting to hard surface flooring, sales of Dalton-made carpet have not rebounded as much as in previous economic recoveries.
More than two thirds of the nation’s carpet in produced in the Dalton area.