Scott Powers
Florida’s unemployment rate dipped to a nearly 10-year low of 4.3 percent with the addition of 21,900 new private sector jobs in March, Gov. Rick Scott announced Friday in Orlando.
While visiting the DusoBox plant, a 62-year-old, family-owned company which recently added 20 jobs to its high-tech corrugated box manufacturing and marketing plant in Orlando, Scott said that the May unemployment number is the lowest since August, 2007.
He also touted the state’s annual private-sector job growth rate of 3 percent, which has exceeded the national average for 62 months running.
The Orlando market once again led the state in job growth in May, and reduced its unemployment rate to 3.6 percent.
Scott used the opportunity to promote his newly-funded “Florida Jobs Growth Grant Fund,” established and funded last week in the Florida Legislature’s Special Session, after the Legislature had previously sought to gut his previous business incentives money program, through Enterprise Florida.
“I am proud that we were able to establish the $85 million Florida Job Growth Grant Fund during the recent special session. This flexible, transparent economic development program will promote public infrastructure and individual job training in order to encourage more businesses to grow and invest in our state,” Scott stated in an accompanying news release.
Scott also credited his past tax policies for DusoBox’s new plant, and for the expansions of other manufacturing facilities.
“One thing we did about four years ago and made permanent last year is we got rid of the sales tax on machinery and equipment so we could get more manufacturing jobs,” Scott said. “This state had not been growing manufacturing jobs when I got elected in 2010, and now we’re one of the leading states for manufacturing jobs in the entire country.”
As of May, Florida’s unemployment rate dropped 6.4 percentage points since December 2010, while the national rate declined by only 5 percentage points in the same time period, officials reported.
“This is all happening while our labor force continues to grow faster than the nation’s. Currently we’re growing at nearly five times the national rate,” said Cissy Proctor, executive director of the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. “We’re also seeing the impacts of the focus we’ve had on diversifying our economy to create manufacturing jobs. In ten of the last 12 months Florida has led the nation in manufacturing jobs.”
According to the report issued by Proctor’s Department of Economic Opportunity, the top growth areas for jobs in the past 12 months are professional and business services, adding 52,900 new jobs; leisure and hospitality, adding 34,900; education and health services, 34,400, construction, 31,000, and trade, transportation and utilities, 30,900.
Florida job postings showed 255,858 openings in May 2017., while Florida’s 24 regional workforce boards reported 28,671 Floridians, including 1,551 veterans, were placed in jobs.
