Paulding Jobless Rate Hits 8.6%

Paulding County’s unemployment rate crept up to 8.6 percent in January as the number of county residents with jobs dropped by 262, the Georgia Department of Labor reported today.

Still, there’s a significant rainbow poking through the cloudy jobs report: The December jobless rate was revised to 8.5 percent, meaning the unemployment rate for Paulding fell 1.5 percentage points over the course of 2011 from 10 percent in January.

Along with the usual refinements that can move the jobless rate by a couple of tenths of a point, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the state department just conducted an annual benchmarking to improve the job data’s accuracy. That effort led to some of the big revisions.

Because the local job numbers are not adjusted for seasonal factors, such as a post-holiday slowdown in retail sales and a winter lull in construction, the most meaningful comparison is with the statistics from a year ago, not a month ago.

Paulding had 1,832 more residents with jobs in January 2012 than in January 2011, the Labor Department found: 66,442 vs. 64,608.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for the 28-county Atlanta metro area, which includes Paulding, rose from a revised 8.9 percent in December to 9.2 percent in January. That’s down from 10.3 percent a year earlier.

The Labor Department said the rate increased because of layoffs in construction, manufacturing, retail trade, transportation, warehousing, and administrative and support services.

In the 15-county area served by the Northwest Georgia Regional Commission, the January jobless rate was 9.8 percent, up from a revised 9.5 percent in December but down from 11.3 percent in January 2011.

Statewide, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate dropped from 9.4 percent in December to 9.2 percent in January, compared with 10.1 percent in January 2011. The state gained 83,700 jobs from January to January, the biggest growth for Georgia since 2006, the Labor Department said.

Professional and business services accounted for the biggest chunk of that growth with 37,000 new jobs, followed by retail trade with 15,100 new jobs, health care and social assistance with 11,100, and manufacturing with 7,300.

The state rate remained above the national rate of 8.3 percent in January, down from 8.5 percent in December and 9.1 percent in January 2011.

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