Unemployment Rate

(WXIA) -- Metro Atlanta's unemployment rate was 8.0 percent in July, up from 7.5 percent in June. The rate was 8.3 percent in July 2013.
Henry County's unemployment rate was 8.1 percent last month.
Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said the increase was due to seasonal layoffs in manufacturing and education. Many of those workers have since returned to their jobs.
In addition, metro Atlanta's private sector created 8,900 jobs in July. Most of the positions were in business; trade and transportation; finance and information services; leisure and hospitality; and construction.
Metro Athens had Georgia's lowest July jobless rate at 6.6 percent. The Heart of Georgia-Altamaha region had the highest at 11.4 percent.
Stockbridge, GA Unemployment Rate:
9.50% for Jul 2014
This rate is an improvement over last year at this time, but the percentage is still higher than the metro area average by 1.5%.  Stockbridge’s unemployment rate is 1.4% higher than the Henry County Average.  Things may look better, but they could use a lot of improvement.  With the coming closing of the Snapper Plant in McDonough the unemployment from that closing will be 475 jobs lost.  There are about 100 of these workers who live in the Stockbridge Area.  From latest indications the workers who are finding work are going outside Henry County and its cities to do so.  They are looking for work that will be in line financially with the positions they are losing with the closing.  Here again this will hurt Henry County in several areas such as those workers buying gas outside the county, food outside the county and possible shopping outside the county.
Creating 1 job here and 3 over there are not going to solve this issue.  There has to be a real company with a good pay base to come to this area to stop this constantly high average of unemployment.  Education is great and we have some of the best teachers and facilities to teach our young people, but the majority leave the area after high school or college in search of a better paying job in another city.  It is much like our police.  We train them, pay for that training to make them some of the best trained in the metro area and then lose them because they are not getting the pay that other police departments are paying their officers.  Henry County is a good training ground for other areas to reap the harvest.

Unemployment has always been a thorne in the side of the Stockbridge business because the lack of having good paying, long lasting jobs.  We saw a small park with a sign that says welcome to Stockbridge and Eagles Landing on August 29th.  The sign and park look nice, but the cost to build the sign and park was over a quarter of a million dollars.  That sign is not going to provide work for this city other than having city workers cut the grass at the site.  There are too many entities in the Stockbridge area going in different directions and not leaning toward the center to help create a stronger and more appealing Stockbridge.  In order to do so, they must first regain the trust of the citizens and then work forward to find good companies for the area.  It is hard to find good companies who want to come to the City of Stockbridge because of the bad press that has been a steady diet since the eminent domain fiasco about the flower shop and the building of a city hall that is out of place for the area.  The problems of Stockbridge are not going to be solved over night because these problems did not start overnight.  The main beginning to this solution of bringing good jobs to the area must come from a group of individuals who will work to bring in better companies instead of infighting over who did what and when.
John Martin

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