State, Sacramento region unemployment rates down

Governor Robert Bentley on Friday announced that Alabama’s preliminary, seasonally adjusted September unemployment rate is 6.0%, down from August’s rate of 6.2%, and below August 2014’s rate of 6.3%.

The Orange County rate fell faster in September than Seminole County’s rate, narrowing the gap between the two counties.

September marks the 35th straight month that Ohio’s job growth rate has been the US average, he said.

Collier had a slightly higher jobless rate last month, at 5.6 percent.

With the transition, the local unemployment rate in September has held steady or, more often dropped, in each of the past 15 years. DS Services – a distributor of bottled water, office coffee and water-filtration systems – is expected to add about 100 jobs by the end of this year, according to Scott’s office.

Leisure and hospitality continued to be the biggest area for new jobs added, at 14,700.

Construction also cut 2,000 jobs and trade, transportation and utilities dropped by 1,100 positions. That means 497,000 people in Florida were counted as jobless, out of a labor force of 9,532,000. The national rate in September was 5.1 percent.

In the past year, the number of unemployed has decreased by 51,000 from 305,000, the state said. The projection would be lower than California’s unemployment of rate of 4.9% during the housing boom of 2006. DeKalb’s unemployment rate dropped from 6.5 percent to 5.8 percent. “Our economy is supporting more jobs than it has all year”.

As in previous months, Suncoast saw growing demand for workers across most industries. So did construction, which fell 800 jobs. Manufacturing posted the largest decreases on a numerical basis, down 3,500 jobs (-0.3 percent).

In related data, the EDD reported that there were 343,419 people receiving regular Unemployment Insurance benefits during the September survey week.