The press release headline from the Georgia Dept. of Labor sounds promising — Metro Savannah’s unemployment rate declines to 9.3 percent in September — but there’s little good news in this latest report.
Yes, the Savannah metro area employment rate was down .2% from 9.5% in August, but the month-to-month numbers aren’t nearly as important as the year-over-year ones. In September 2010, the Savannah metro area unemployment rate was 9%.
I generally just stick to reporting the metro area data, which includes Chatham, Bryan, and Effingham counties. But with an election impending, city residents might want to know that Savannah’s unemployment rate for September was 11.1%, up rather dramatically from 10.4% in September 2010. The data is here.