Business and construction jobs increased enough in the Baton Rouge metro area during July to more than offset job losses in the leisure, hospitality and food service industries, leading the unemployment rate for the nine-parish region to fall to 5.7%, down from 6.2% in June and 6.7% in July last year.
The Baton Rouge metro area added 6,600 jobs in July, the largest increase in the state and 1,000 more than Lake Charles, which had the second-largest increase, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released today by the Louisiana Workforce Commission. July marked the 55th straight month that the Baton Rouge metro area added jobs, compared to the same month the year previous.
In East Baton Rouge Parish, unemployment fell to 5.8% in July, a drop of 0.4 percentage points from June and down 1.1 percentage points from last July. The unemployment rate in Ascension Parish, meanwhile, fell to 5.2%, down from 5.6% in June and from 6.1% in July last year. Livingston Parish’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.3% in July, down from 5.6% in June and 6.3% in July 2014.
St. Helena has the highest unemployment rate in the Baton Rouge metro area in July, at 9.1%, while Ascension has the lowest, followed closely by Livingston.
Year-over-year unemployment levels dropped in six of the eight statistical metro areas in Louisiana in July, with the Lafayette and Houma-Thibodeaux areas both posting slight upticks in their respective levels. The Lafayette level increased to 6.4% in July, up from 6.1% in July last year. In Houma-Thibodeaux, the rate increased from 5.5% last July to 5.6%. The increases can be attributed to the loss of mining and logging jobs as the price of oil continues to decrease, LWC says.
Across Louisiana, unemployment dropped to 6.6% from 7.2% last July as the state added 13,400 jobs throughout year. Nationwide, unemployment dropped to 5.6% from 6.5% last July.
