Local Unemployment Drop in April

The unemployment rate in the Georgia Mountains region dropped to 4.3 percent in April, down from 4.7 percent in March.

State Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said the rate went down because the number of employed residents in the Georgia Mountain area went up.

However, he said the labor force in our area has actually decreased, which he called troubling.

It’s mostly good news, but the only bad news we saw is that we had over 800 workers leave the labor force, which is not what we want to see right now, not in this economy when we have employers needing workers to fill the jobs they have open.”

The Department of Labor Butler said now has a new system to track the number of local jobs in the Georgia Mountains Region.

Butler said that system shows a lot of local businesses in our area are hiring.

“We do have a new system where we can get a real-time snapshot of what’s going on in the Georgia Mountains region when it comes to job and what we’re seeing is very good news. During the month of April we saw over 2,000 new jobs posted just in the Georgia Mountains Region alone and these are jobs posted by local employers for jobs that are now available,” Butler said.

Locally, the unemployment rate for Franklin County was 4.9% – down from 5.3% in March.

Franklin County’s total labor in April was 9,427 – of that, 482 were collecting unemployment benefits.

In Hart County, the unemployment rate last month was 5% – down from 5.6% in March.

Hart County’s total labor force last month was 10,573 – of that, 529 workers had applied for unemployment benefits.

Butler encourages anyone looking for a job to go on the Department of Labor’s new job search web site at www.employgeorgia.com.