The U.S. Labor Department conducted its annual revision of labor numbers and found there were 31,000 more people in the Iowa labor force in January.
Iowa Workforce Development director Beth Townsend says that puts the rate at 67% “It’s basically a six-tenths of a point improvement on our labor force participation from where we were at the end of 2024,” she says. Townsend says they’ve been working for some time to get that rate back up. “We lost a large number of Iowans during the pandemic, and we’ve been fully but surely bringing them back. But then we also finally started to see the impact of the baby boomers retiring in 2024 and so our labor force steadily declined by very small amounts, but nonetheless declined,” Townsend says.
Townsend says a good sign was the increase in women aged 45 to 54 in the workforce. “Which had previously had been a group that had left the workforce to care for others in other words, either children or parents. But we saw them leave the workforce during the pandemic, and that was the largest group that we saw come back in the last few months.” she says. “So women aged 45 to 54 and then women aged 20 to 24 also saw an increase.”
With the revised numbers, the January unemployment rate held at the revised December level of 3.3%. “The good news about labor force participation, obviously, that’s the real number, because that tells you how many people you have working or looking for work in your total population,” Townsend says. “And we always want that number. You know, pre pandemic in 2019, I think we hit our high of around 70% so we’ve still got a ways to go.”
Unemployment and participation numbers for February will be out next week.