It was the third steepest monthly decline since records have been kept, the State Department of Labor and Industry says.
A day after New Jersey announced its unemployment rate fell three-tenths of a percentage point to a four-year low, Pennsylvania today said its rate dropped by an equal amount, the third-largest monthly decline as long as records have been kept in the state.
Pennsylvania's unemployment rate was 7.6 percent in April, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry, down from 7.9 percent in March.
The ranks of the unemployed decreased by 17,000 to 496,000 and employment rose 13,000 to 6,008,000, the department said. The decline trails only March of this year and July 1983 for the largest monthly decrease in unemployment, the department reports, while the increase is the second-highest in the past 12 months. The labor force shrank by 3,000 over the month.
Pennsylvania added 8,300 private sector jobs in April, the largest monthly number in that sector since September 2008, the department said. The largest gains were in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality and educational and health services, which all reached record-high levels in April, the department said.
“April was a tremendous month for job growth and the state’s employment situation,” Julia Hearthway, secretary of the department, said in a statement. “Pennsylvania has added 125,700 private sector jobs to the economy since Gov. (Tom) Corbett took office.”
New Jersey announced Thursday its unemployment rate had dropped from 9 percent to 8.7 percent, the lowest level in four years, the state Department of Labor reported.