(Radio Iowa) – The state unemployment rate rose one tenth-of-a-percent to three-point-five percent in April. Iowa Workforce Development director Beth Townsend says that’s because more people are looking for work. “We had five-thousand Iowans come back into the workforce, that’s the really good sign. Yeah, the unemployment rate ticked up a tenth of a point, but I would take that every day if I could get five-thousand more people coming into the workforce each month,” Townsend says.

Townsend says manufacturing continues to be a down area. “We’ve lost 74-hundred jobs over the last 12 months,” she says. “So all of 2024, we continue to see a decline in manufacturing jobs in Iowa as a result of the bad shape the economy was in 2024, so it’s going to take some time to recover from that. ” Townsend says there’s no clear evidence yet on the impact of tariffs on the job market.

“I think the tariffs went into effect sometime in the last couple of weeks of April, which was probably too short of a time to say whether that’s going to have a negative or positive impact,” she says. Townsend says the private service industries were responsible for most of the job gains in April, adding about 41-hundred new jobs.

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“We saw good producing secret sectors, added 800 jobs. We saw and professional and business services are the ones that gained the most, and that’s professional, scientific and technical services,” she says, “and includes administrative support and waste management. Construction gained 13-hundred jobs last month. That’s the third month we’ve seen an increase and they’re up 28-hundred jobs since the beginning of the year. ”

Townsend says adding more people to the workforce will help the economy continue to grow. “If we could add five-thosuand new Iowans in the workforce, you know five-thousand over the next six months, that would be, you know, 30-thousand people. That would get us closer to our pre pandemic numbers,” Townsend says.

The U-S unemployment rate remained at four-point-two percent in April.