Nearly one in five Georgia workers is now unemployed, according to statistics released by the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s an unemployment rate of around 18 percent to 20 percent, and it’s likely to spike even higher.
About 900,000 Georgia workers filed initial unemployment claims in the four weeks ending April 11, according to the labor department statistics.
Nationwide, 18 million have filed for unemployment in the past three weeks.
“Next week, it’s very possible that we will be at a million (in Georgia),” said Alex Camardelle, a senior policy analyst at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI), an Atlanta-based nonpartisan think tank. Added to the 178,054 who were already unemployed as of February, those numbers could push Georgia’s unemployment rate well beyond 20 percent for the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
[…] The job losses are disproportionately falling on African American workers, women and low-paid workers in service industries, according to a GBPI analysis.
Of those who filed for unemployment benefits in March, 55 percent were black workers, who make up about 31 percent of Georgia’s overall workforce of about 5.2 million, according to Camardelle’s analysis.
