Unemployment around Jacksonville rose to 5.2 percent in November, as the First Coast’s economy struggled to return to pre-pandemic norms, data released Friday showed.
For the second month in a row, counts from Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity said the number of people holding jobs grew at the same time as the number looking for work.
But the number considered unemployed in metropolitan Jacksonville – 40,867 – grew faster as the count of people in the area’s total workforce reached its highest level since the pandemic shutdowns of businesses and offices began in March.
The 782,451 people counted as part of the area’s workforce in November were still about 15,000 fewer than in February.
Statewide, unemployment was unchanged at a seasonally adjusted rate of 6.4 percent.
Retailers didn’t hire as many people as they usually have in November, DEO’s chief economist, Adrienne Johnston, told reporters, a choice that matched the modest crowds holiday shoppers saw during Black Friday.
The continued rise of online shopping likely played a role in the weak hiring, Johnston said, although hiring by online retailers such as Amazon — which has created more than 5,000 Jacksonville jobs over three years — has become its own source of employment.
Compared to November 2019, there were 29,400 fewer private-sector jobs in the Jacksonville area, DEO said in a separate report Friday that was based on employer surveys in various industries.
Only two major industries reported having more jobs than a year earlier: government (up 1,000 jobs) and construction (up 400 jobs).
Despite the strain the pandemic has brought to the area, Jacksonville’s job market has fared better than most of Florida. Having started the year with unemployment levels slightly higher than the state, the area’s jobless rate has been less than the state’s every month since March.
Only a few metropolitan areas — Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Gainesville, Naples — had lower unemployment in November.
Since unemployment peaked at 11.2 percent in April, the Jacksonville area’s jobless rate has moved unevenly, dropping most months but heading upward twice as people re-entered the workforce. The state mirrored the first of those upturns, in July, when Florida’s unemployment spiked to 11.4 percent.
Although the pandemic caused a lot of job losses, things really are looking better for 2021, said Bruce Ferguson, president of CareerSource Northeast Florida, a publicly funded agency that helps people in six counties find work.
“The good news is that we are seeing a rebound in jobs across a wide spectrum of industries,” Ferguson said.
Openings CareerSource handles are “close to pre-pandemic numbers and we anticipate to see this trend continue,” Ferguson said. He said openings in healthcare, finance, transportation and logistics are particularly strong.
Like in other months, unemployment happened unequally across the region. Duval County’s unemployment rate, 5.8 percent, was the area’s highest, while St. Johns County’s 4 percent was the lowest, and the second lowest among the state’s 67 counties. Clay and Nassau counties each had 4.3 percent unemployment (tied for fourth lowest statewide), and Baker County had 5 percent. Putnam County’s unemployment rate was 7.7 percent.
The state’s numbers also adjusted the area’s unemployment for October downward, to 4.8 percent, instead of the 5 percent initially reported.