In previous months, the Alabama Department of Labor (ADOL) touted “record low unemployment,” but the scene in Selma and Dallas County didn’t mimic those gains – however, the latest numbers to be released show a drop for both the city and the county.

Selma saw a nearly one-point decrease in unemployment for August, going from 7.3 percent in July to 6.5 percent in August, while the county experienced a similar trend, improving over July’s 6.4 percent with a 5.5 percent rate in August.

Year over year, Dallas County has dropped by nearly two points, having been at 7.4 percent in August 2018, while Selma improved by a point and a half, improving significantly over the 8.0 percent seen in August 2018.

Despite the improvement, Selma is still among the three cities in the state with the highest rates of unemployment, a full point higher than Pritchard, which has the second-highest rate in the state.

Dallas County, on the other hand, is not listed among the three counties with the highest rates of unemployment – the county’s rate of 5.5 makes it 0.3 percentage points lower than the county with the third-highest unemployment rate in the state, Greene County.

At the state level, ADOL Secretary Fitzgerald Washington is boasting that the state is yet again breaking records for employment – the state’s seasonally-adjusted average for August is 3.1 percent, with the unadjusted rate coming in even lower than that, 2.8 percent.

Either way, August’s numbers reflect a significant improvement over last year’s, which were at 3.9 percent in August 2018.

“Not only can we be proud of the fact that Alabama is breaking record after record, but we can also be proud that more of our good men and women are gaining employment,” said Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey in an ADOL press release.  “Alabama has made significant progress regarding our economy.  Not only are we putting people to work, but their earnings are increasing and our industries are growing.  Even with all this headway, we realize we must continue exhausting our efforts to make sure that all Alabamians who want a job have a job and we won’t stop until we achieve that goal.”

Along with record-low unemployment rates, Washington noted that there was more to be celebrated in the most recent report.

“Along with this brand-new record low unemployment rate, Alabama continues to break other records as well,” Washington said in the release.  “More people are working in Alabama than ever before, a record we’ve broken every single month this year. More than 68,000 Alabamians are working today that weren’t last year and that’s great news.  Fewer people are unemployed in Alabama than ever before and our workforce is larger than it’s ever been, with consecutive growth for the past eight months.”

Indeed, the most recent ADOL numbers show that more than 2.2 million Alabamians were working in August, an improvement of more 8,300 over July’s numbers, and the state is continuing a trend of matching or besting the national average for job growth.