More than 3,500 job hunters stood in a line a mile long, and some continued to wait hours after the fair technically closed. This all happened amidst reports of low unemployment rates for the county and state.
GBPI Senior Policy Analyst Alex Camardelle joined On Second Thought to discuss how measuring unemployment might not paint an accurate economic picture — and how that misinterpretation can affect adversely policy decisions.
“Georgia’s unemployment rate for the state is about 3.9 percent. When you disaggregate that along lines of race, ethnicity and gender, you see massive gaps between people of color and white individuals in the state, and those gaps have grown over time,” said Camardelle in his interview with Virginia Prescott. “You also see that in terms of wages. So the unemployment rate has declined, but we’re seeing that our wages have actually not rebounded since the recession. A lot of the job growth has been concentrated in opportunities that wouldn’t necessarily be considered economic mobility opportunities.”
