Despite what has apparently been solid holiday spending, Georgia’s hiring engine sputtered last month, producing the most sluggish November hiring since 2010, the state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
After nine consecutive months of growth, the state lost about 2,000 jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.7% from 3.6% in October, officials said.
The poor posting last month is a surprise, as November is often when retailers and other firms staff up for the holiday rush.
Few large-scale layoffs have been reported, but the number of job openings has fallen and worker confidence has slipped, according to survey by Glassdoor, an online site for jobs and research.
Slightly fewer than half of workers who responded said they were feeling confident about the coming six months, said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor.
“Even as the election passes and some business confidence measures rise, employee confidence remains under a winter chill,” he said in an email.
Historically, when jobs are scarce, some workers move to the sidelines, postponing the search until things pick up. And in Georgia last month, the number of people in the workforce shrank slightly, officials said.
That’s the first dip in the labor force since November 2023, according to the Department of Labor.
Economists often warn against making too much of any month’s data, especially when the hiring glitch was at odds with broader data available for the month. U.S. retail sales were up 0.7%, according to a Census Bureau report earlier this week.
Moreover, the Georgia loss contradicts the national data released earlier this month that showed 227,000 jobs were added last month in the United States.
Yet like Georgia’s, the U.S. jobless rate ticked up, going from 4.1% to 4.2%.
Georgia has added 45,900 jobs during the past 12 months. Except for the pandemic year of 2020, when job loss was in the hundreds of thousands, recent growth is slower than any year since 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The deceleration of growth is generally pegged to interest rates — the cost of borrowing for consumers and companies — which have been relatively high since the Federal Reserve started lifting its benchmark rate two years ago to fight inflation.
The Fed started cutting its rate this fall, including a quarter-point reduction announced Wednesday, but economists say all changes in rates take time to work their way through the economy and rates are still higher than they were between 2007 and 2023.
November is typically a month in which retail and other holiday-centered spending fuels hiring.
In November 2023, the state added 16,900 jobs. In 2010, the last time that the state lost jobs during the month, the economy was struggling to emerge from a devastating recession and consumer spending was still tepid.
Last month, the largest job losses came in hospitality, which shed 3,000 positions, the Labor Department said. Administrative support and services, often office jobs or other help to companies, dropped 2,600 jobs. Retail, which typically expands during the holiday season, lost 1,100 jobs.
Yet the health care and social assistance sector, which has been a steady source of strong growth since the pandemic, grew by 2,300 jobs during the month. Other sectors with gains included finance and insurance, arts and entertainment, logistics and local government.
Georgia’s job market by the numbers
Georgia jobs, November
- Best, pre-pandemic: 13,500 (2014)
- Worst, pre-pandemic: -23,900 (2008)
- Best, since pandemic: 22,700 (2020)
- Recent: -2,000 (2024)
Georgia unemployment rate, November
- Best, pre-pandemic: 3.4% (2000, 2019)
- Worst, pre-pandemic: 10.9% (2009)
- Best, since pandemic: 3.0% (March-May, 2022)
- Recent: 3.7% (2024)
Sources: Georgia Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
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