Iowa’s unemployment rate rose slightly in September. Ann Wagner, a state-employed labor market analyst, says despite that, there’s good news in Iowa’s workforce. The unemployment rate in Iowa in September was 4.5 percent. But Wagner says the rate went up because there was “growth in the labor force.” One-million-six-hundred-52-thousand people were in the Iowa labor force in September, an all-time record. “We have an ironic situation here where (when) we seem to have job growth, it’s many times accompanied by an increase in the unemployment rate because it encourages more people to come out and look for work,” Wagner says. She says over the past couple of years, as hiring picks up, more people who’ve not been working “come out looking” for jobs. The jobless rate in Iowa in August was two-tenths of a percent lower than it was in September. The unemployment rate in September of last year was nearly half-a-percent higher than the rate recorded last month in Iowa. Wagner says there are about 4200 more jobs in Iowa’s manufacturing sector today compared to this time last year. The largest month-to-month decline came in professional and business services. There were 1600 fewer jobs in that sector of the economy in September compared to the previous month.
