Fewer Georgians filed initial unemployment insurance claims last month than in the weeks leading up to the pandemic last year, and the state’s unemployment rate hit 3.2%, a 20-year low.
Those are two welcome signs of economic recovery after record-breaking layoffs sent workers home across the state, but celebrations of those numbers should be tempered by the large number of Georgians quitting their jobs and not seeking new employment…
“We do have some decent data on why people were not going to work in between August and September. We saw a small uptick in the number of people who said that they don’t want to be employed, but much larger increases in the number of people who said that they weren’t working because they themselves were sick, or they were caring for someone with COVID-19 symptoms,” he said. “The number of people who were not working because they were worried about getting sick also doubled, and these are statistics specifically for Georgia.”