Jobs report tileUnemployment in Georgia fell last month to the lowest level in more than seven years, but the Peach State still added jobs at a slower pace than the U.S as a whole and joblessness in Georgia remained above the U.S. average in August.
The Georgia Department of Labor said today that unemployment in Georgia dipped by a tenth of a percent to 5.9 percent last month.
"This is the first time Georgia's unemployment rate has dropped below 6 percent since May 2008," Tennessee Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said in a statement today. "The rate declined as our employers laid off the fewest workers for any month in more than 15 years and continued to create jobs."
Over the past year, Georgia employers added 83,200 jobs, or 2 percent, to cut the jobless rate by 1.2 percentage points from the 7.1 percent rate in August 2014. Georgia's growth rate was still slightly below the 2.1 percent growth in employment for the United States as a whole, which had only a 5.1 percent jobless rate last month.
The number of initial claims for unemployment insurance, a measure of new layoffs, declined by 9,152 or 25.8 percent, to 26,335 in August, the fewest since number of such claims since May 2000.