Louisiana is marking its second-largest seasonal over-the-month increase in employment in decades. That’s the word from Workforce Commission Secretary Ava Cates who says the ongoing recovery from Hurricane Ida has had a large impact on the state’s employment situation with a seasonally-adjusted non-farm gain of more than 34 thousand jobs in October. “Which is absolutely phenomenal. It’s our second-largest increase in series history which goes back to 1990,” says Cates.
The largest gains were seen in leisure and hospitality, as well as construction. The jobless rate for October was five-point-four percent, a decline of point-four-percent.
Cates says construction jobs in the state went up by 82-hundred in October, a month-over-month gain coupled with a year-over-year gain of nearly six-thousand jobs. She says, “pre-pandemic we were seeing a decline in construction jobs with some of the jobs, LNG’s that were being constructed in Lake Charles reaching completion so that over-the-month and over-the-year gain in construction is a great thing.”
While a lot of people are shrugging off going back to work because of the pandemic or other reasons, Cates notes the Workforce Commission has a laundry list of job openings up for grabs. “We do have over 31,000 jobs available and higher on our website so we encourage all the listeners or any job seeker to go to our website and apply for jobs there,” says Cates. That address is https://www.louisianaworks.net/hire.
She says New Orleans and Baton Rouge added the most jobs from September to October than any other metro areas in the state, with Alexandria the only MSA to lose jobs, 200 of them during the same period.
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