In a recent column, I took a close look at January’s payroll employment estimates for the Savannah metro area, which includes Chatham, Effingham and Bryan counties.
Those estimates showed robust growth over the past year, and the newly released data for February show strong growth is continuing into 2015.
Employment in Georgia grew by 3.8 percent between February 2014 and February 2015. Growth in the private sector was even stronger at 4.3 percent.
Payroll job growth over the past year in the Savannah metro area outpaced the state as a whole. We saw 4.9 percent job growth between February 2014 and February 2015. The private sector added jobs at a 5.7 percent rate.
As I’ve noted here before, economic recoveries in recent decades have included steady increases in public employment, but the ongoing recovery from the deep 2007-09 recession has come in the face of cuts and stagnation for many public sector jobs.
The extremely strong employment growth rates are dramatically higher than the rate of population growth. We won’t see numbers like these forever, but we are definitely making up for some of the ground lost in the recession.
And, yes, we are still trying to escape the shadow of that protracted recession and slow recovery. Last week’s announcement on the closure of J.T. Turner Construction was a sad reminder of lingering woes. (Note that a separate company, J.T. Turner Construction Co. of Savannah Inc., will continue to operate, according to a statement.)
Two sectors I have been eyeing closely have shown particularly robust growth over the past year. Year over year, local construction employment increased by 10.7 percent, and manufacturing employment by 5.1 percent.
The broad category of professional and business services grew by 10.3 percent over the past year.
Leisure and hospitality continued to add jobs faster than any other local sector, however, with a 10.8 percent increase from February 2014 to February 2015. Almost 25,000 local residents work in leisure and hospitality.
Statewide, 10.6 percent of payroll jobs are in leisure and hospitality. In Savannah, that number is 14.7 percent.
All of the estimates cited so far are based on the ongoing survey of payroll establishments.
The unemployment rate is estimated through a separate survey of households. Many working people, including the self-employed and domestic workers, do not show up in the counts of payroll jobs. The estimates from the establishment survey are considered more reliable from month to month than the much noisier numbers from the household survey, but all the data tell us something.
The Georgia Department of Labor recently released the January workforce estimates for the state and for various political subdivisions. The Savannah metro area had a 6.4 percent unemployment rate in January 2015, down from 7.4 percent in January 2014.
January is typically a weak month for employment, and the metro area estimates are not adjusted for normal seasonal trends, so we could see the local unemployment rate fall below 6 percent later this spring. The Savannah metro area’s unemployment rate in January was just below the unadjusted state rate of 6.5 percent.
The unemployment rate fell in the Savannah metro area because the number of people reporting themselves as working outpaced the growth of the local labor force. The size of the workforce increased by 2,851 over the past year to 171,914 in January 2015. Over the same period, the number of employed persons increased by 4,368.
These are robust numbers. Really robust.
Unemployment rates are improving across the state, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the numbers remain dire in some Georgia counties, especially in lightly populated areas in the southern half of the state.
Fifty-six of Georgia’s 159 counties had unemployment rates of more than 8 percent in January 2015. In 20 of those counties, the unemployment rate was more than 9 percent.
The ongoing struggles of rural hospitals and rural school systems do not bode well for those areas.
We have not yet seen the final version of the bill that would increase transportation funding in the state, but some of the provisions will likely hurt rural areas, where residents have no choice but to drive long distances and where major road projects are not warranted.
But things are looking pretty good here at home.
City Talk appears every Tuesday and Sunday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.