By JOYANNA LOVE/ Senior Staff Writer

The unemployment rate increased slightly for Chilton County in January.

The rate of those unemployed went up from 3.2 percent in December 2018 to 4.0 percent in January 2019.

Of the 19,476 members of the labor force for Chilton County, 18,705 members were employed in January.

The unemployment rate in January 2018 had been 4 percent for Chilton County.

Alabama’s state unemployment rate for January was 3.8 percent.

“People are working in Alabama. 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,” Fitzgerald Washington, secretary of the Alabama Department of Labor, said in a press release.

The 2018 Alabama unemployment rate for January 2018 had been 4.0 percent.

“While maintaining our record low unemployment rate, we’ve also seen some great over-the-year growth in some of our high wage industries,” continued Washington. “Both the construction, information, and manufacturing sectors saw significant increases from January 2018 to January 2019.”

In January 2019, Wilcox County remained the county with the highest unemployment rate at 10. 5 percent, while Shelby County had the lowest unemployment rate at 3.2 percent.