Sometime in 2014, the Savannah metro area might finally have as many jobs as it had over five years ago when employment peaked.
Or we might not.
As the recession took hold, I had a reputation around town for being pretty pessimistic, but even I have been surprised by the sluggishness of the employment recovery since the economy began growing again.
According to the estimates released last week by the Georgia Department of Labor, the Savannah metro area (Chatham, Effingham and Bryan counties) had 160,000 payroll jobs in November.
That’s only 400 more than in November 2012. The local population is almost certainly increasing at more than 1 percent per year, so job growth of 0.3 percent doesn’t cut it.
We are still seeing the same worrisome trends from recent months.
The only local sectors showing robust job growth are retail trade and hospitality.
Over the year, we lost more construction jobs. I had expected that sector to rebound slowly in 2013 as the housing market recovered.
Despite apparently strong years from major local corporations, we lost 200 manufacturing jobs over the last 12 months. Employment in transportation, warehousing and utilities remained flat.
State government employment increased slightly year-over-year in the Savannah area, but we lost both federal and local government jobs.
In last week’s press release from the Georgia Department of Labor, Commissioner Mark Butler touted the decline in the state’s unemployment rate and cited “a broad job market recovery.”
And, sure enough, payroll employment in the state grew by a healthy 2.3 percent over the last 12 months. Private sector payrolls grew by 3 percent.
But Georgia’s job growth in 2013 has been dominated by the Atlanta metro area, where payrolls have grown by 2.5 percent.
The rest of the state has generally seen weak job growth in 2013, with only a handful of metro areas adding enough jobs to keep pace with population growth.
It’s also worth noting that almost 40,000 long-term unemployed workers in Georgia are set to lose their federal extended unemployment benefits on Dec. 28.
It’s difficult to know how that will affect employment in early 2014, but I’m guessing that a significant percentage of those unemployed workers will drop out of the labor force entirely.
So we might continue to see declines in the state’s unemployment rate in the coming months because of declining labor force participation rate and because of robust growth in the Atlanta area.
But we need to see considerably faster job growth in Savannah and other metro areas before concluding that we’re seeing a broad recovery.
City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net and http://www.billdawers.com. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.