The jobs numbers are out for May and Iowa Workforce Development director, Beth Townsend, says they are positive.
“The unemployment rate remained the same (2.8%), although the national unemployment rate went up in May,” she says. “And then the labor force participation rate ticked down a tenth of a percentage point, which is negligible.” She says there was some growth in jobs. “Education and Health Care gained 1,400 jobs. And we always like to see healthcare growing, they grew about 1,100 jobs individually,” she says, “so we’re always happy to see more healthcare, employers being able to find their workforce because they’ve been in a shortage and a crisis for a long time now .”
Townsend says there are some issues on the horizon. “The most concerning things we’ve seen from an employment perspective are just the recent announcements of layoffs by John Deere and Bridgestone Firestone, and of course the plant closing in Tyson,” Townsend says. She says the Tyson closing in Perry and the other announced layoffs will start to show up in the June and July unemployment numbers. But she says the job conditions remain very good for the workers impacted by those company moves.
“You have 56,000 open jobs. We have the reemployment case management program that’s been very effective in helping Iowans find their next job,” she says. “We’ve been working with the Tyson employees since that layoff was announced, for instance and helping them find that next job, hopefully with little to no break in their employment.”
Townsend is confident in the IWD process. “We do have a good system in place to help people that are affected by those layoffs and hopefully that will minimize the overall impact of larger layoffs on the unemployment rate, but we won’t really know that until we see the numbers in June and July,” Townsend says.
Unemployment rose above three percent at the end of 2023 and has been moving down slightly since the start of the new year. The May rate of 2.8% this year is the same as in May one year ago.