Des Moines, Iowa — The numbers from February show a slight drop in the state’s unemployment rate. Iowa Workforce Development spokesman Jesse Dougherty.
The number of people in the labor force did drop around 39 hundred for February.
He says employers reported 11 thousand new jobs in February.
There have been some recent layoffs announced, including around 13 hundred workers at the Tyson plant in Perry. Dougherty says the impact of the Perry layoffs won’t be know for a while as they are set for June. He says the Perry layoffs and others are a concern, but he says they are not believed to be a negative overall indicator.
The US unemployment rate increased to three-point-nine percent (3.9%) in February.
Meanwhile, the latest county-by-county unemployment figures are those for the month of January. And northwest Iowa continues to have some of the lowest unemployment in the state. Osceola County is actually number one, with only 2.3 percent unemployment. Adams County is second with 2.4, and then five counties are tied for third-lowest unemployment, one of them being O’Brien County, with 2.5 percent unemployment.
A few lines down, you can find both Lyon and Sioux counties, both tied for 6th-lowest unemployment with 2.8 percent.
The figures are not seasonally-adjusted meaning that some workers are laid off in the winter as a general rule, and that’s not figured into the numbers. All numbers were slightly up in January, presumably as a result. Both O’Brien and Osceola were up seven-tenths of a percent. Lyon was up one percent, and Sioux was up 1.2 percent.
