Columbus jobless rate improving amid less-than-robust job creation

What goes up must come down, said the late English scientist Isaac Newton, and that would include the Columbus unemployment rate.

As the Georgia Department of Labor prepares to release next week the pre-holiday season October figure for Columbus and the state’s other 13 metro areas, it’s a good time to take a look at how far the city and its workers have come from the double-digit jobless abyss it faced nearly seven years ago.

It was in November 2000 that the Columbus-area rate bottomed out at 4.2 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For historical purposes, that was less than a year before terrorists struck America on Sept. 11, 2001, an event that would be followed by a costly war that the U.S. still wages, with an economy-sucking Great Recession also tucked painfully between then and now.

The latter financial tsunami began a quick and steady ascent in the unemployment rates not only of Columbus, but also those of every other state and the U.S. as a whole. No one was immune. Columbus peaked at a 10.4 percent figure in February 2010 and has slowly worked its way lower since then, albeit in fits and starts, ups and downs.

The Georgia labor office on Thursday reported that Georgia’s unemployment level had again declined in October, reaching 4.3 percent. It also noted that the lowest state jobless rate ever recorded was 3.4 percent in November 2000. That’s the same month and year that Columbus touched its low of 4.2 percent.

Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler, in his remarks Thursday, pointed out appropriately that the monthly numbers his office routinely releases are only a small piece of the overall picture. It can take months, and years perhaps, to get a solid snapshot. In September of this year, the state lost 3,400 jobs because of Hurricane Irma’s stormy impact, but rebounded nicely in October and pushed above a total of 4.5 million jobs statewide right now.

“After the effects of the storm, this month’s numbers are much closer to what we are used to seeing,” Butler said. “All the indicators — job growth, unemployment claims, labor force and employed residents — are trending in the right direction.”

And when it comes to the employment bottom line, the Columbus metro area is trending along the general path of full recovery, if not as robust as most other metro areas in Georgia. That’s obvious when, according to metro area data released Thursday, Athens has gained 4,100 jobs since October of last year, Savannah has picked up 5,200, Augusta added 6,200 and Gainesville climbed by 2,200. Atlanta, the employment juggernaut it is, saw its job total surge by nearly 66,000 for a total of just under 2.8 million.

Columbus, like a handful of other metro areas, has added a few hundred jobs over the past year, 600 locally to be exact, giving the city a total of 121,600. But the one barometer Columbus has been seeing steady progress in is its unemployment rate, which in September 2016 was 6.6 percent. The September rate this year, reported by the labor department last month, was 4.9 percent.

The Columbus rate for the most recent October will be released, again appropriately, next Thursday, which happens to be Thanksgiving Day. An improvement of another tenth of a percent or two on the local unemployment rate would be welcome, and something for which Columbus and its residents and workers can be thankful.

This story was originally published November 16, 2017 at 4:14 PM with the headline "Columbus jobless rate improving amid less-than-robust job creation."