Tourism jobs drop, but unemployment rate for August still inches down to 5%

TALLAHASSEE — Florida’s unemployment rate inched down slightly from July to August as the labor force continues to grow, but the number of people without jobs holds steady.

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity on Friday announced the state’s unemployment rate for August stood at 5%, down 0.1 percentage point from July.

However, a troubling note is that leisure and hospitality jobs declined from July to August by 4,300, a possible sign of the impact of the highly transmissible delta variant of COVID on tourism.

For metro Orlando, though, the jobless rate was also 5% for August, down from 5.3% in July and 10.7% in August 2020.

The latest report showed 529,000 people qualified as being unemployed, down 1,000 from revised July numbers, while the state’s workforce increased by 65,000 to 10.54 million.

The figures mark the second month since state leaders began to openly push people back into the workforce following COVID-19 layoffs, and come as the national job-creation total of 235,000 in August was deemed disappointing.

Still, Adrienne Johnston, the department’s chief economist, called Florida’s figures “positive.”

“I think what we saw is continued job gains in the private sector, which is what we were expecting and what we were hoping to see,” Johnston said Friday. “More importantly, as we saw more jobs added to payrolls … we also see people joining the labor market.”

Florida’s labor force has grown by more than a half-million people since October. In June 2020, when the unemployment rate stood at 11.6%, an estimated 1.149 million Floridians were listed as out of work.

The state Department of Economic Opportunity reports that Florida has recouped 76.8% of the jobs considered lost due to the pandemic.