Tennessee unemployment rate falls in May after record April

Tennessee’s jobless rate in May fell compared with a record increase the month before, as more than 300,000 people continued to receive unemployment payouts during the new coronavirus outbreak. The Tennessee Department of Labor & Workforce Development reported Thursday that the preliminary seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for May was 11.3%. That’s a drop of 4.2 percentage points from April, when Tennessee reached its highest monthly unemployment rate ever, at 15.5%. Unemployment has skyrocketed since March, when Gov. Bill Lee and city and county officials began closing or limiting access to businesses, a move that has led to more than a 600,000 new jobless claims.