ATLANTA – Georgia’s unemployment rate fell to 4.3% last month, down from 4.5% in March, the state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
While the number of jobs in April declined by 9,300 from the previous month, it was up by 416,000 compared to April of last year, when the coronavirus pandemic was forcing businesses across Georgia to shut down and lay off workers.
Altogether, 69% of the jobs Georgia lost in March and April 2020 have come back.
“Georgia is continuing to see our unemployment rate drop and the labor force increase,” state Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said Thursday. “[But] our focus is aligning job seekers with viable employment to continue to strengthen our economy.”
Meanwhile, Butler defended Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision last week to cut off supplemental federal unemployment benefits to out-of-work Georgians effective June 26.
In making that announcement last week, the governor argued the $300-per-week federal checks are acting as a disincentive for unemployed Georgians to return to work.
On Thursday, Butler put some numbers behind the governor’s case.
According to Butler, 82% of Georgians now receiving unemployment benefits earned less than $20,000 annually in their prior jobs. Counting the federal benefits, those same people are now receiving an equivalent salary of $28,808 by staying home, Butler said.
“Our job is not to provide wage replacement for individuals, but to offer career opportunities for Georgians to support their families and better their lives for years to come,” he said.
“Temporary financial support has served its short-term purpose, but providing training opportunities, increasing certification and access to increased education provides long-term solutions.”
Butler’s remarks came one day after labor advocates and Democratic state lawmakers descended on the Georgia Department of Labor’s headquarters in downtown Atlanta to call on Kemp the reverse his decision to end the federal unemployment benefits.
Members of the group accused the governor of ignoring ongoing difficulties many jobless Georgians have faced while searching for new jobs or going months without their unemployment claims being processed.
But Butler said a record number of jobs in Georgia are going begging for workers. More than 239,000 jobs are listed on the labor department’s website EmployGeorgia, with more than 72% of those openings paying more than $30,000 a year.
The industries with the highest number of positions currently posted are health care, retail trade, accommodations and food services, transportation and warehousing and manufacturing. Those same job categories have been among the hardest by the pandemic.
ATLANTA – The chief of the Georgia Department of Transportation will be getting a $100,000 raise making him the third-highest paid unelected agency head in state government.
Russell McMurry
The State Transportation Board voted unanimously without discussion Thursday to increase Commissioner of Transportation Russell McMurry’s annual salary from $350,000 to $450,000, representing a nearly 29% raise.
The last pay increase McMurry received came in 2017, DOT spokesman Scott Higley wrote in an e-mail.
McMurry oversees an annual DOT budget of more than $3.6 billion, including more than $1.9 billion in state funds, and a payroll of nearly 4,000 employees.
He was appointed commissioner by the board in 2015, after serving as the agency’s director of planning and chief engineer. His career with the DOT began back in 1990.
Since taking office, McMurry won widespread accolades for fast-tracking the rebuilding of the Interstate 85 bridge in Atlanta, which collapsed in March 2017 when a fire broke out in construction material stored beneath the span. The new bridge opened to traffic in May, a month ahead of the originally anticipated schedule.
McMurry also has steered an ambitious program of highway construction and maintenance across Georgia made possible by a $950 million transportation funding bill the General Assembly passed in 2015.
The only two nonelected state agency heads who earn higher salaries than McMurry are Griff Lynch, executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority, whose annual salary in the last fiscal year was $828,888, according to the state website Open Georgia, and University System of Georgia Chancellor Steve Wrigley, who was paid $523,950 in fiscal 2020.
ATLANTA – The Biden administration has ordered the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla and a second county jail in Massachusetts to stop housing immigrant detainees, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
An order signed by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is part of a broader review of how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) handles immigrant detainees.
Both the Irwin County facility and the jail in Bristol County, Mass., are under federal investigation following complaints of abuses of detainees.
However, the decision was made to stop holding immigrants at the two sites because the number of detainees has declined, rendering them unnecessary, a DHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity told the newspaper.
“We have an obligation to make lasting improvements to our civil immigration detention system,” Mayorkas said Thursday in a prepared statement. “This marks an important first step to realizing that goal.”
Thursday’s announcement came eight months after several Georgia-based immigrant advocacy groups filed a complaint with the federal Office of Inspector General and in a class-action lawsuit describing multiple abuses at the Irwin County Detention Center.
The charges included a pattern of unnecessary and invasive gynecological procedures performed on women detainees without informed consent.
“This is the first time ICE has cut a contract for a detention center in recent years,” the groups Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, the South Georgia Immigrant Support Network and Detention Watch Network wrote in a statement Thursday.
“This announcement signals a major win for people who’ve been detained at the facility and have bravely spoken out against the abuses they’ve experienced and also for organizations in Georgia that have long fought to shut it down.”
The Irwin County Detention Center currently has 114 immigrant detainees out of almost 1,000 beds at the facility. The Massachusetts jail, which holds nearly 200 beds, is down to just seven detainees.
Despite Thursday’s announcement, a national immigrant advocacy group noted there has been a nearly 33% increase in the number of people in ICE custody since President Joe Biden took office in January.
The group We Are Home sent a series of recommendations to the DHS in February calling for a comprehensive case review of every person in ICE custody and an end to the use of private prisons and state and local jails for ICE detention.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s film industry is setting records even as the coronavirus pandemic continues dampening activity in other economic sectors.
Movies and TV productions filmed in Georgia generated $101 million in wages for members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees during the first quarter of this year, Lee Thomas, the state Department of Economic Development’s deputy commissioner for film, music and digital entertainment, told members of the agency’s board Wednesday.
That’s up significantly from the $74.8 million in wages posted during the first quarter of 2020 and a record first quarter for the industry in Georgia.
“ Film has come roaring back,” Thomas said. “I don’t know of another industry that has rebounded so quickly.”
When COVID-19 struck Georgia hard in March of last year, it shut down film production for two months As a result, the film industry’s economic impact in the state declined during the last fiscal year for the first time since the General Assembly enacted a generous film tax credit in 2008, from $2.9 billion in fiscal 2019 to $2.2 billion in fiscal 2020.
But the industry began to bounce back last May when Gov. Brian Kemp released a set of voluntary best practices to protect film crews from the virus.
In July, the filming of commercials resumed, followed by independent films in August and major studio productions in September.
Thomas said Georgia only lost two film projects to COVID-19. The rest of the productions interrupted by the virus last year have returned, she said.
Thomas said projects are currently shooting across the state. The list of communities hosting film projects includes Savannah, Thomasville, Tifton, Sandersville, Toccoa and Lumpkin County, she said.
The film industry also has helped prop up the bottom lines of live entertainment venues during the pandemic, Thomas said. The Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta’s Fox Theater and the Strand in Marietta all hosted film productions while their event schedules were empty because of the virus, she said.
Thomas credited the film tax credit for the industry’s ability to weather COVID-19 in Georgia.
“We have a great [tax] incentive,” she said. “It’s straightforward. Producers can easily budget it with no surprises.”
But no amount of tax incentive would work as well as Georgia’s tax credit without the diverse locales the state boasts, from beaches to mountains to big cities and small towns.
“Pretty much any script you have we can probably find somewhere that matches it in the state,” Thomas said.
A related industry that also hasn’t missed a beat during the pandemic is Georgia’s video gaming industry, which also benefits from a tax credit adopted by the General Assembly.
Limited to just five gaming studios and fewer than 45 jobs in 2005, the industry had exploded to more than 160 studios and 4,000 jobs by 2019, said Andrew Greenberg, executive director of the Georgia Game Developers Association.
Greenberg said the numbers for 2020 aren’t out yet, but he’s expecting the industry put up a strong showing. That wouldn’t be surprising considering the role gaming played during the pandemic in connecting players isolated in their homes by shelter-in-place orders.
“All indications are 2020 blew the roof off the [earlier] numbers,” Greenberg said. “This is a huge industry.”
Greenberg said 21 Georgia colleges and universities offer game design programs, providing a strong training ground for students interested in staying in the state after graduation and working in the industry.
State lawmakers and worker advocates shout, “Open up these doors!” during a protest outside the Georgia Department of Labor office in Atlanta on May 19, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Labor advocates and state lawmakers in Georgia called on Gov. Brian Kemp Wednesday to reverse his decision to end expanded federal unemployment benefits next month, saying the move would hurt low-wage workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The governor’s announcement last week that he will end the extra federal $300 weekly unemployment checks on June 26 sent shock waves through many Georgia communities where unemployed workers have relied on the added benefit for months to cover rent, food and utility bills.
Local labor leaders protested Kemp’s decision outside the state Department of Labor building in downtown Atlanta, arguing the loss of the $300 per week would cripple many Georgians still struggling to find work during the pandemic.
They also questioned where the abandoned federal dollars would go instead since the Biden administration has authorized the additional federal benefit to remain into September.
“This is not the time to take away benefits from families,” said Nancy Flake Johnson, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Atlanta. “To take these modest resources away from families now is nothing less than inhumane.”
Kemp and opponents of the extra federal benefit have argued the $300 checks have incentivized many jobless Georgians to avoid rejoining the labor market, putting strain on local businesses still recovering from more than a year of economic damage caused by the pandemic.
State labor officials plan to nix several federal pandemic unemployment programs on June 26 along with the $300 extra benefit including an additional $100 for Georgians with mixed earnings, an extension on regular benefits and assistance for self-employed, part-time and gig workers.
“As we emerge from this pandemic, Georgians deserve to get back to normal,” Kemp said in a statement last Thursday. “And [last week’s] announced economic recovery plan will help more employees and businesses across our state do so.”
Critics accused Kemp of glazing over ongoing difficulties many out-of-work Georgians have faced while searching for new jobs or going months without their unemployment claims being processed.
Marcellus Rowe, a former public-transit worker in Atlanta, said he has had a tough time finding comparable work after losing his job in November 2019. The $300 federal benefit has been crucial to helping keep his finances afloat, he said at Wednesday’s protest.
“We are tired and frustrated,” Rowe said. “And as a Black man, begging and pleading are no longer options.”
Several labor advocates and Democratic lawmakers slammed Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler, a Republican who – like Kemp – faces reelection next year. They criticized the continued closure of state labor offices due to the pandemic while Georgians are being asked to return to work.
“We all know that this system is broken and needs transparency,” said state Rep. Kim Schofield, D-Atlanta. “If you want people to be able to go to work and look for work, open these doors.”
Butler has said his office pushed to process nearly 5 million unemployment claims that have drawn an average of 60,000 phone calls a day from out-of-work Georgians, all with shorthanded staff and a tight budget that lawmakers left largely unchanged during the 2021 legislative session that ended March 31.
“We may have had to process a lot of claims, and had a lot of work,” Butler said in an email Thursday. “But we do not struggle at what we do. We’re very good at what we do.”
Even so, Butler has echoed Kemp in framing the extra federal benefit as a damper on attracting workers back to the labor market, noting also that his agency has distributed nearly $22 billion in benefits since the pandemic broke out.
“Right now, the state has a historic number of jobs listed on Employ Georgia,” Butler said in a statement last week. “We are seeing some of the highest pay scales with enhanced benefits and signing bonuses.”
But labor advocates and lawmakers rejected the argument that laid-off and furloughed workers are to blame for the labor issues, stressing that even with jobs many Georgians do not earn enough to make ends meet because of the state’s $7.25-per-hour minimum wage.
“What we hear from our leaders is blame, false assumptions and downright disrespect,” said state Sen. Tonya Anderson, D-Lithonia, who chairs the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus. “Georgia will never progress if our workers are not prioritized.”
This story was updated to clarify Commissioner Butler’s comments on his office’s efforts to process unemployment claims during the pandemic.
