Iowa’s unemployment rate held steady in September and state labor market analyst Ann Wagner says the number of jobs in Iowa grew. "We were actually happy with the September data because it showed a definite rebound as far as job growth is concerned," Wagner says. For the third consecutive month, Iowa’s unemployment rate stood at three-point-nine percent.
"But non-farm jobs turned the corner," Wagner says. "We’d had very two, very slow months." There was a gain of 4,100 non-farm jobs in September in Iowa, according to Wagner. That made for a new record level of non-farm jobs in Iowa. It’s now about one-and-a-half million.
"We had seen in the prior two months a slow-down and the fact that we had this turn-around in job growth in September was a bit of relief," she says, "because if we’d had a third month of slow job growth we would have been getting concerned." Iowa lost 600 manufacturing jobs in September and another three-hundred jobs in professional and business service industries.
But several other industries saw gains, according to Wagner. There were 800 new construction jobs in Iowa in September and 900 jobs added in leisure and hospitality businesses. Seven-hundred jobs were added in Iowa’s education and health care sectors, but the biggest gain was in government which saw 15-hundred people added to the job rolls. Wagner says that’s mostly due to new hires who came on board at the start of the school year.