Georgia experienced an all-time low unemployment rate for the month of December at 2.6 percent. The numbers were just released Thursday morning by Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler. That number dropped two-tenths of a point from November’s rate of 2.8 percent. The national December 2021 unemployment rate was 3.9 percent.
Georgia leads the country as one of the top ten states for lowest unemployment rates, as well as the lowest unemployment rate among the top ten most populated states.
Butler said that the low unemployment numbers outperform other states who imposed much stricter guidelines for businesses during the pandemic. “Making critical decisions early in the pandemic has allowed us to get Georgians back to work quicker and allow business owners to provide the goods and services Georgia needed for our economy to rapidly recover,” said Commissioner Butler. “We are grateful for leadership that limited restrictions on businesses and avoided the steep job losses seen in other states.”
The Georgia Labor Department says that they partnered with state officials during the pandemic to make decisions for Georgians that, “led to quicker economic recovery helping our businesses to bring employees back to work more successfully.”
Georgia’s number of jobs was up 24,200 over the month and up 198,200 over the year to 4,648,000, making up for over 97% of the jobs lost during the pandemic.
Commissioner Butler also announced Thursday a new all-time number of employed Georgians up 14,026 to 5,041,987 in December. He also said the number of unemployed was the lowest it’s been in over forty years. The number of unemployed was down 10,325 to 135,906, the lowest figure since January 1980 when the labor force was at 2.46 million.
There are over 200,000 jobs listed online at EmployGeorgia.com, resulting in a minimum of over 305,000 unfilled positions.
