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Report: Georgians Still Suffering From Great Recession

October 25th, 2013

It will be a while before Georgia’s workforce gets back to where it was before the Great Recession.

Credit WABE 90.1 FM

Georgia fared worse than other states in the recent economic crisis. Despite some improvement in the past year, Georgia’s economy had only regained 57 percent of the jobs it lost during the recession as of June 2013. Taken from the State of Working Georgia 2013.

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That’s according to a report from the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

WABE’s Rose Scott reports, digging out from the economic slump won’t be easy.

Broadcast version of this story.

In fact, it will take years according to Wesley Tharpe.

He’s an analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

A big challenge, Tharpe says, is how to recover from over 3-hundred thousand people losing their jobs.

“Georgia was 8 percent versus about 6.3 percent in terms of the national average as well as in the southeast as a whole. And so we kind of fell deeper and have steeper climb than a lot of other states.”

Many jobs were related to the housing and commercial real estate market.

According to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nation as a whole is creating new jobs.

But Tharpe says those Georgians who were the collateral damage of the great recession are now faced with other challenges.

“The state is continuously adding new workers through people aging into the workforce and people moving here. So we don’t only have to fill the gap of jobs we lost, but we have to account for ongoing population growth as well.”

From lawmakers to advocates, to the private citizen, Tharpe says this report is a guide to fully understand why many Georgians are still struggling due to the great recession.