Pennsylvania sees another big monthly drop in jobless rate

HARRISBURG » Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate began to look like the rest of the nation’s in September, taking another steep drop from its post-pandemic high as the labor force and payrolls grew, according to state figures released Friday.

However, the state still has yet to recover many of the jobs lost to the economic impact of the coronavirus.

Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate was 8.1% in September, down 2.3 percentage points from August’s adjusted rate of 10.4%, the state Department of Labor and Industry said.

That is below the state’s pandemic-driven unemployment high of 16.1% in April, the highest rate in more than four decades of record-keeping.