(Radio Iowa) – Iowa’s numbers are out for July and Iowa Workforce Development director Beth Townsend says things held steady.  “Unemployment remained at three-point-seven percent (3.7%) and our labor force participation also remained the same in July at 67-point four percent (67.4%),” she says. Townsend says there are positives when you look deeper into the numbers. “This was the first month we hadn’t seen an increase in unemployment for a few months, so that was a good sign. We added 18-hundred Iowans to the workforce, another good sign. Not enough to move the needle in terms of the labor force participation rate, but it’s still a good sign to be adding more workers,” Townsend says.

Townsend says there were 11-thousand more people working this July compared to one year ago. “We’ve had some layoffs in the last 12 months, and so the fact that we still have 11-thousand more Iowans with jobs is a good indication that we’re able to absorb and recover from those layoffs,” she says. Manufacturing has been one of the sectors taking loses, but Townsend says there was better news there in July. “We saw an increase in manufacturing jobs in both durable and non-durable goods in July of 600, and that’s the first month that we’ve seen an increase in manufacturing since March,” she says.

Unemployment had gone up one-tenth of a percent in March, April, May and June. The national unemployment rate increased to four-point-two percent in July.