Despite growing recession worries by most company owners, employers across Tennessee and Georgia continued to hire more workers last month and kept unemployment at or near historic lows in both states during September.
The jobless rate remained at 2.8% in Georgia last month, the lowest level in modern history, after Georgia employers added nearly 13,000 more workers during September. In Tennessee, employers added a net 13,700 jobs last month to keep the unemployment rate at 3.4% — only two tenths of a percentage point below the all-time low rate of 3.2% reached this spring.
With the continued demand for workers to fill vacant jobs and retailers staffing up for the holidays, economists expect unemployment to remain low for at least the rest of this year.
“What we see right now is an economy that is still expanding because of the strength of the labor market,” University of Georgia economist Jeff Humphreys said in a telephone interview. “The Federal Reserve is trying to slow things down in a very aggressive way and ultimately I think they will be successful and I expect a recession to begin in the second quarter of next year.”
But Humphreys, who is director of the Selig Center for Economic Growth in Athens, Georgia, predicts the economic downturn will be one of the shortest in modern history and unemployment in Georgia will remain at or below 4% and may not reach that cyclical peak until late 2023 or early 2024.