The Alabama Department of Labor (ADOL) issued a press release Monday touting the eighth consecutive month of employment growth, with 2,123,398 Alabamians marked as employed for January.

The January numbers are an improvement of more than 2,500 over December’s numbers.

“People are working in Alabama,” said ADOL Secretary Fitzgerald Washington. “Employers are hiring in Alabama.  We continue to report record numbers of people with jobs and we are seeing fewer and fewer people counted as unemployed, which is what we like to see.”

The state is also boasting its third lowest unemployment count in history, with just under 83,500 people marked as jobless in January.

Despite the gains in employment, the state’s unemployment rate remained unchanged between December and January, 3.8 percent, but has improved by one-tenth of a percent over last year’s number.

The record-breaking unemployment rate is the seasonally-adjusted rate – the rate when not seasonally adjusted inched up from 3.5 percent to 4.4 percent.

“You can’t say the state went down because the majority of the state went up,” said Wayne Vardaman, Executive Director for the Selma-Dallas County Economic Development Authority. “It’s not just us going up.”

In every county in the state, unemployment rates rose at least nominally.

According to ADOL Communications Director Tara Hutchison, the seasonally-adjusted number removes seasonal trends from the equation so that state’s do not see large increases or decreases in their unemployment rates.

In the case of the most recent jobs report, the county numbers likely took a dive due to seasonal hires who lost their part-time jobs at the beginning of the year.

“It almost always happens between December and January,” Hutchison said. “For the most part, that is attributed to the seasonality of that time period.”

Wage and salary employment increased by 31,500 over the year, with a jump of more than 7,600 in the leisure and hospitality sector and an increase of more than 4,000 in both the trade, transportation and utilities sector and the construction sector, which grew by more than 5 percent.

Despite statewide gains, Selma was listed among the cities with the highest unemployment rates in the state, at 8.8 percent, and Dallas County’s unemployment rate is among the highest in the state at 7.7 percent.

Since January of 2018, Selma’s unemployment rate has increased by 1.4 percent and Dallas County’s has grown by .7 percent. Both the city and the county have seen their unemployment rates increase since December, when Selma was at 7.9 percent and Dallas County was at 6.5 percent.

Vardaman attributes much of the drop off to lay-offs in the City of Selma and at Globe Metallurgic, but is optimistic that numbers will rise at Zilkha Biomass and International Paper continue hiring.

Additionally, Vardaman noted that a saw mill and a pipe company are slated to come online later this year and will offer additional employment opportunities for out-of-work citizens.

“They’ll balance out,” Vardaman said. “It’s a timing issue, so it should swing back the other way.