Iowa jobless rate saw rise in July

Iowa's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate edged up to 3.8 percent last month from 3.7 percent in June, according to Iowa Workforce Development. The state's jobless rate was 4.3 percent in July 2014.

Nonfarm employment grew by 8,100 jobs, with positions added in virtually all sectors last month. That lifted nonfarm employment 30,900 jobs higher than a year ago.

Mike Owen, executive director of the Iowa Policy Project, a nonprofit public policy research and analysis organization in Iowa City, said while July was a strong month for Iowa jobs, some caution is advised in evaluating the long-term picture.

'The trend over about the last four or five years has been 2,000 or below per month,” Owen said. 'With the 8,100 jobs in July, the average for the last year has been brought up to about 2,600 jobs per month.

'We have more jobs now than we had at the start of the last recession, but if you account population growth, we're still behind where we were at that time. We still have about 36,000 jobs to go.”

Owen said there's not a lot of job quality information in the July report, which is based on estimates from Iowa Workforce Development and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

'They may be part-time jobs or full-time jobs,” he said. 'What we've seen through the years is we tend to have growth in areas that don't pay as well as the jobs we've lost.”

Iowa Workforce Development reported the number of working Iowans declined to 1,636,500 in July. That is 4,000 lower than June, but 4,100 higher than in July 2014.

The gain in nonfarm employment last month was primarily due to a 6,100-job increase in the private sector workforce. Iowa's goods-producing and service sectors created more jobs for the third consecutive month, while government added 2,000 jobs primarily due to hiring at the local level.