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Chattanooga-area unemployment rate rises in October

Staff Photo by Dave Flessner / The Georgia Department of Labor office in Dalton, Georgia, shown Tuesday, is processing more unemployment claims as jobless rates edged higher in the carpet capital.
Staff Photo by Dave Flessner / The Georgia Department of Labor office in Dalton, Georgia, shown Tuesday, is processing more unemployment claims as jobless rates edged higher in the carpet capital. Staff Photo by Dave Flessner / The Georgia Department of Labor office in Dalton, Georgia, shown Tuesday, is processing more unemployment claims as jobless rates edged higher in the carpet capital.

By Dave Flessner 5 min read

Unemployment rose across the Chattanooga area last month even as many employers continued to hire more workers to fill job vacancies.

Jobless rates increased during October in each of the 19 counties in Southeast Tennessee and Northwest Georgia, according to new figures released by the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development and the Georgia Department of Labor.

In Hamilton County and several of its neighboring counties, the nonseasonally adjusted unemployment rate was above the U.S. rate of 3.4% but still near the historic low rates reached earlier this year.

Overall in the six-county Chattanooga metropolitan area, unemployment rose by half of a percentage point during October to 3.3% from the record low reached in September. Unemployment was still below the 3.5% rate in metro Chattanooga in October 2021.

“The labor market isn’t showing signs of any significant recession yet,” Don Bruce, director of the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Growth at the University of Tennessee, said in a phone interview last week.