Unemployment number ticks up from historic low

The big takeaway from December’s Florida jobs report: the unemployment rate has ticked up, albeit from a historic low.

The December number: 3.7 percent, up from 3.6 percent the month before.

Despite this slight raise in the official unemployment rate, Gov. Rick Scott‘s narrative of being the jobs governor remains as intact as it was.

In December, 30,000 jobs were created. This capped off a year when 205,000 jobs were created, and 1.497 million were created in the last seven years.

“Florida had a great year of job creation in 2017 and we will fight each day to make sure our state remains the best place for new opportunities in 2018, and for years to come,” Scott asserted.

Labor force participation, per the Department of Economic Opportunity, is at 57.1 percent — which trails the overall American figure of 62.7 percent.

A thousand fewer people have jobs compared to November, with 25,000 new people in what is called the “civilian non-institutional population.”

Metro areas are booming, with Orlando, Miami, and Tampa leading the state in job creation.

Earlier this month, Scott addressed the jobs situation in a Jacksonville gaggle.

“We’re going to continue to work both in our large counties and our rural counties to get more jobs,” Scott said.

“What you see in our state is the labor force is growing at multiples of what the rest of the country is. The job market is growing at multiples of what the rest of the country is. People are coming to Florida. Numbers came out last week — over 340,000 people have moved to the state since last June. We’ve had a significant number of people move here from Puerto Rico and they’re getting jobs,” Scott said.