Unemployment in the Chattanooga area dropped in April to its lowest level in history as employers continued to hire more workers even as the size of the local workforce dropped during the month.
Despite higher interest rates pushed up by the Federal Reserve Board’s attempt to slow the economy and inflation, the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development said the jobless rate in the six-county Chattanooga metropolitan area fell by four tenths of a percentage point in April to 2.6%.
Chattanooga’s nonseasonally adjusted unemployment rate in April matched Tennessee’s overall rate and was the lowest monthly rate since the state began keeping comparable records over the past three decades.
Unemployment in Chattanooga was also well below the comparable nonseasonally adjusted jobless rate of 3.1% for the U.S. as a whole.
“Demand and production remain strong despite the higher interest rates,” Don Bruce, director of the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, said in an analysis of the new data. “We expect job growth to be strong in Tennessee over the next few years, outpacing the nation, although growth will likely not exceed the state’s strong rates of pre-pandemic growth of around 2% per year.”