(Radio Iowa) Iowa’s unemployment rate held steady in June at three-point-two percent. Iowa Workforce Development director Beth Townsend says several areas gained jobs in June.
“Private industries were responsible for the June increase. We saw retail trade added over one-thousand. Finance and insurance added 600. Education and healthcare are now 45-hundred jobs above where they were last year, and construction is 17-hundred jobs above where they were this time last year,” Townsend says. On the other side, manufacturing lost one-thousand jobs and is down 43-hundred jobs so far this year.
“You know, we want to stop the bleeding in manufacturing. So we’d like to see the steady decline of jobs in manufacturing stop in Iowa, but that’s probably going to take time, right, for the economy to come back and those jobs to become more available,” she says. There’ve been some return of jobs in manufacturing and announcements of new facilities, but Townsend says it’s not going to be a quick turnaround.
“It will take a while to make up these manufacturing losses, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t. And as the national economy gets improved, then, hopefully we can see some of these jobs returning,” Townsend says. Iowa’s workforce has been moving more like a tractor than a sports car through the first six months.
“We’re seeing slow but steady increases in the number of Iowans with jobs and the number of jobs. So, you know, that’s a good sign. I think, you know, we’d rather be in the position of gaining jobs overall than losing them,” Townsend says. “But I think, you know, this is probably going to be a slow growth year if we’re in June and we’re still at the slow but steady growth rate.” The workforce participation rate dropped slightly in June, and Townsend says that’s likely because this is the time of year when a lot of people retire and leave the workforce.
