(Radio Iowa) – Iowa’s unemployment rate in April was three-point-three percent — the same as March. Iowa Workforce Development Director Beth Townsend says there was a modest increase in hiring last month. “We did see an increase of 3400 jobs in the month of April, which is a good sign,” Townsend says. “We also saw growth in manufacturing, which we haven’t seen in the past few months.” Iowa manufacturers added 400 workers to their payrolls in April. Over the past 12 months the manufacturing sector has shed 38-hundred jobs.
“The fact that we saw an increase when we haven’t really seen an increase since last fall, that’s a positive sign that manufacturing is starting to hire again in some areas,” Townsend said. Last August, for example, John Deere laid off nearly 240 workers from three factories. Since January, John Deere has recalled 140 employees to work at its facilities in Dubuque and Davenport. Iowa’s labor force participation rate was 67-and-a-half percent last month, down slightly from March and below the all time high of over 70 percent set in 2019.
Townsend says there are a combination of factors influencing that, including Baby Boomers who are retiring for good. “We saw a lot of them retire right before the pandemic or during the pandemic,” Townsend says. “And then a lot of them reentered the workforce after the pandemic was over. You’re always shedding workers due to retirement.” Townsend says some workers are dropping out of the workforce to start a family or take care of aging parents.
“But if you look nationally, you know, we’re always in the top 10 in terms of the number of states that have high labor force participation numbers and when you look at the states that have low unemployment and high labor force participation rates like Iowa does, there’s only a handful of states,” Townsend said. “It’s usually Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Utah, so there might be other states that have lower unemployment rates, but if you look at their labor force participation rate, some of them are even less than 60%.”
The latest data on Iowa’s job market indicates hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues have been adding workers since January, with another 16-hundred added to payrolls in April. And over the past two months, private schools in Iowa have hired 12-hundred people. In the past year, health care and social services is the sector of Iowa’s economy that’s shown the most gains — adding 47-hundred more workers since September. Townsend says there are good paying jobs in health care and other industries for students graduating this month from Iowa colleges and universities.
“If you’re a job seeker for your first ‘real job’ then I would say we’re in a good position to offer you good opportunities and to look at www.iowaworks.gov to check those out.” Over 200-thousand Iowans were working in Iowa health care facilities last month and nearly 270-thousand others were employed by state or local governments. Many of those government employees were working in public hospitals or clinics, including those managed by the University of Iowa.
