Iowa Workforce Development spokesperson, Kerry Koonce, says the June unemployment rate held steady at 4.4 percent. “This is compared to 4.8 a year ago, and the national rate is standing at 6.1 percent, so the Iowa is still significantly below that,” Koonce says.
Koonce says college graduates out looking for jobs impacts the market at this time of year. “They might not be employed yet, so they’re part of our labor force but they can also increase our unemployment numbers,” Koonce says. “So the overall labor force increased, but so did the number of people that were unemployed, that causes our rate to hold steady.”
Koonce says there were gains. “We did actually add 31-hundred jobs to the economy for the month. Most of those being in the government sector at the local level,” Koonce says. Workforce Development figures show a gain of 10,800 jobs in the last three months.
There were some loses in June. “The education and health services category took about a 17-hundred drop,” Koonce says. She says most of that is from private schools and colleges going into their summer breaks.
The total number of working Iowans increased to 1,624,600 in June, up 500 from May, and 32,100 higher than one year ago.