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Summer Raises Metro Atlanta’s Unemployment Rate

July 28th, 2016

A worker leaves a Georgia Department of Labor career center, Friday, Sept. 19, 2014, in Atlanta. Unemployment rates rose in nearly half of U.S. states in August, even as employers in two-thirds of the states added jobs. Georgia reported the nation’s highest unemployment rate, at 8.1 percent. That’s the first time Georgia has had the … Continued

Metro Atlanta saw a spike in its unemployment rate for June, according to a new report from the Georgia Department of Labor. The percentage of people out of work rose from 4.5 in May to 5.3 percent.

While those numbers might sound scary on their face, Department of Labor spokesperson Sam Hall said they’re typical.

“This always happens in June,” Hall said. “A lot of it is because of just the seasonal happenings within the labor force and it’ll smooth back out.”

Hall said, when summer begins in June, two things happen every year: school related jobs end and a whole bunch of graduates start looking for work. Together, that brings the unemployment rate up.

To get a real sense of how Atlanta’s economy is currently doing, Hall said, it’s more effective to do a year-to-year comparison.

The unemployment rate has actually dropped seven-tenths of a percentage point since last June, when the rate was at 6 percent. According to Hall, that’s a pretty significant improvement.