The recession that supposedly ended didn’t end, at least in terms of job availability. Unemployment in Coweta County jumped to 9.7 percent in June, to 10.9 percent in Newnan and to 11.6 percent in the Three Rivers area.
Coweta’s jobless rate hit 9.7 percent in June, up from 8.8 percent in May. The June figure shows 5,831 people out of work in a workforce of 59,948. The unemployment rate a year ago was also 9.7 percent.
Coweta’s highest unemployment rate for the past 20 years occurred in February 2010 at 10.9 percent. Jobless numbers after that began to slowly shrink, hitting a low of 9.1 percent in October 2010 then rising again to 9.8 percent in January, then sliding again to 8.8 percent in April.
Newnan, too, saw a significant increase in unemployment in June. The 9.9 percent rate in May jumped a full point to 10.9 percent in June. As bad as it is today, the jobless rate in Newnan was 11.1 percent a year ago.
Next door in Fayette County jobless numbers in June hit a 20-year high with a rate of 9.3 percent.
The unemployment rate for the 10-county Three Rivers Regional Commission area jumped nearly a point in June, with jobless figures showing 11.6 percent of the region’s 223,949 workforce with no job. The rate in May was 10.7 percent.
Similarly, the 28-county Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area had a June jobless rate of 10.5 percent, up from 9.7 percent in May and 10.3 percent a year ago.
The jobless rate in Georgia hit 10.5 percent in June, figures that are not seasonally adjusted. That compares to a 9.7 percent rate in May and a rate of 10.3 percent in June 2010.
Eighteen of Georgia’s 159 counties have a jobless rate of 14 percent or higher while 44 counties have a rate of 12-13.9 percent.
The jobless picture across the United States in June showed a rate of 9.3 percent that translates into 14.4 million people out of work.
Far from the full picture, unemployment figures presented each month are not the entire story when it comes to meeting a family’s financial obligations. A measure not tracked by state and federal labor departments is an underemployment condition that arises when a person wants full-time work but can only find part-time employment. Gallup in mid-June tallied the national underemployment rate at 9.4 percent on top of the 9.3 unemployment rate.
