Statewide Iowa — The state unemployment rate remained unchanged once again in March, and has now been at the historically low 2.4% level since October. The latest seasonally-unadjusted unemployment figures for northwest Iowa are down.
Iowa Workforce Development spokesperson, Donna Burkett, says the major disaster issues that hit in March didn’t influence the numbers.
She says the lack of flood impact on the unemployment rate could be attributed to several factors.
There were some areas that lost jobs in the month.
The construction industry has been off to a slow start, and also lost some jobs in March.
Burkett says they should learn more about the flooding impact when the April job numbers come out. She says there’s also a possibility that the flood repairs could have some impact on the construction industry. The leisure and hospitality industry rebounded from declines in February to add one-thousand jobs in March. Overall though, the total number of working Iowans was 5400 higher than February. And Burkett says Iowa is still one of the states with the lowest unemployment in the country.
The unemployment rate was 2.7% one year ago. The U-S. unemployment rate remained at 3.8% in March.
The latest county-by-county figures are those for February. In northwest Iowa, Lyon and Osceola counties were tied for the lowest unemployment at 1.8%. That’s a tie with several counties for third place, behind 1.7 in Johnson County and 1.4 in Story County. Those figures are not adjusted for seasonal employment like construction and resort work, so they’re naturally a little higher in the winter. But they’re down from January when Lyon County had 2.3 and Osceola had 2.2. Sioux County’s February figure was 2.2%, down from 2.6% in January. O’Brien’s February rate was 2.3, down from 2.6 in January. All four rates are lower than the February rates for 2018.
