Posts tagged Iowa jobs
Beyond jobless rate drop: Little for optimism
Iowa’s unemployment rate fell to 6.6 percent in July, down from its peak of 11 percent in April. But larger picture offers little grounds for optimism.
The overall jobs deficit is still substantial. The Iowa economy has shed 97,200 jobs since February — that’s 35,500 more jobs than were lost in the entirety of the Great Recession. And that 6.6 percent unemployment rate is still equal to the highest monthly rate recorded during the Great Recession.
The drop in the unemployment rate is generated less by any observable economic recovery than by the fact that discouraged workers are dropping out of the labor force entirely. Since February, Iowa’s labor force participation rate (the share of the adult population who are working or looking for work) has plunged from 70.9 percent to 65.6 percent — a decline twice as steep as that of the nation as a whole, and steeper than all but one other state (Kentucky).
For those on unemployment (106,392 continuing claims, and 6,544 new claims last week), the uncertainty and insecurity is mounting. It is now almost a month since the $600 “PUC” bump to unemployment benefits expired, and it is unclear when or how the $300/month “Lost Wages Assistance” program established by executive order while kick in as a partial replacement.
Because the Lost Wages Assistance program requires a 25 percent match in state money, it will be unavailable to those who are receiving “Pandemic Unemployment Assistance” (PUA) benefits instead of regular state benefits. Meanwhile, Iowa Workforce Development is aggressively trying to move beneficiaries from the regular state program over to PUA. And, as of September 8, the job search requirements for almost all receiving UI benefits will be reinstated.
It’s hard to spin any of this as good news. While just under 100,000 Iowans have gone back to work, almost 130,000 have dropped out the labor force entirely. For many, the return to work — into the teeth of a pandemic that shows no sign of abating — is driven less by a genuine economic recovery than by an unemployment insurance system whose benefits are that is suddenly less accessible and less generous.
Colin Gordon is a senior research consultant for Common Good Iowa. He is a professor of history at the University of Iowa.
Closing the books — why real math matters
Or: How Governor Branstad claimed to reach his jobs goal but did not come close
As it all turned out, the job-growth goal set by former Governor Terry Branstad was at best ambitious, and never realistic.
With four previous terms behind him, and 12 years out of office, Branstad came back in 2010 with a goal of 200,000 new jobs in five years.
Nothing wrong with setting lofty goals. The biggest problem with this one was the way the longtime Governor decided to measure progress toward it. If the goal was never realistic, the counting method was never math.
As late as April, the last jobs report released in Governor Branstad’s tenure, the official report from Iowa Workforce Development bore an extra line, ordered by someone, for “Gross Over-the-month Employment Gains,” from January 2011. And that line would, magically, put the state over the 200,000 mark — a year late, but more on that later.
There was no explanation with the report on how this special line was computed, but analysis showed the administration cherry-picked job gains to come up with the “gross” figure. Job categories that showed a loss in a given month were simply ignored.
Last week, IWD released its first report on monthly job numbers since Governor Kim Reynolds took office, and the “gross” gains line was gone from the official spreadsheet.
— Through the end of the Governor’s tenure, Iowa produced 106,900 new jobs.
In fact, we didn’t reach 200,000 under even the Governor’s counting gimmick until January of this year, a year late. Meeting the goal would have required 60 months averaging over 3,300 net new jobs a month. Instead, we have seen far less:
The slow pace of recovery should not have been a surprise to anyone. Iowa and the nation had just come out of a shorter and less severe recession in 2001. The pace of that recovery — up until the Great Recession hit — was quite similar to what we have seen over the past six years before even the latest pace slowed down.
Posted by Mike Owen, executive director of the Iowa Policy Project
