The unemployment rate for February stayed the same as January at three-point-three percent. Iowa Workforce Development director Beth Townsend says there were some ups and downs in the job market.
“Employers shed about 1,100 jobs in February, which ends the streak of job gains that started in November. So that’s not good. And of course, manufacturing overall has lost the most jobs in the last year, with 7,600 lost jobs,” she says. Townsend says on the positive side there was an increase of 500 jobs in manufacturing, primarily in food production and animal processing.
“We saw gains in private industries led by healthcare, which increased 800 jobs in February, which is always a good sign that healthcare and social assistance have grown in the last five months,” she says. “Healthcare is our most critical need for workforce right now. So that’s a good sign and a good trend.” Federal officials always do revision of labor numbers at the start of the year, and that revision included an increase in the number of Iowans in the workforce for January. Townsend says that number also stayed the same in February.
She says the Iowa labor situation is doing okay right now. “We’ve weathered a tough patch with, like I said, the loss of manufacturing jobs around 7,600 in the last 12 months. That’s quite that’s quite a bit from our largest industry, but it could have been a lot worse than and now hopefully we’re coming out of that, or we’ll get to the other side of that in the next few months,” she says.
The 3.3% unemployment rate in February is up from 2.7% one year ago. The U.S. unemployment rate increased to 4.1% in February.