The state Department of Commerce reported Friday that the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell from 5.8 percent a month earlier. The United States rate ticked downward to 4.8 percent from October 2014’s 5.5 percent. Utah’s unemployment rate is 3.6 per cent, and Idaho’s is 4 per cent.
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This regional breakdown is just the latest evidence that the economy has reached full employment. Manufacturing shed 1,700 jobs over the month, posting Oklahoma’s largest job loss in October.
Payrolls rose in 40 states and the unemployment rate fell in 32 as the US labor market powered ahead in October.
Over the longer term, more jobs must become available to counter the declining labor force, he said.
Texas employers added 20,000 seasonally adjusted jobs in October, the eighth month of 2015 with jobs added, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.
The numbers are based on a survey of households and will fluctuate as the state Department of Employment and Labor gets more reliable figures in its quarterly census from establishments. “But as long as the national rate keeps going down, there is an opportunity for it to go several tenths of a percentage point lower”. The number of employed workers jumped from 168,700 to 169.7 00 and increase of 1,000 more jobs. Grand Island’s jobless rate for October was 2.9 percent.
Florida’s private-sector job growth month-to-month has been positive for 48 consecutive months. The largest over-the-month percentage decline in employment occurred in Louisiana (-0.3 percent), followed by North Dakota (-0.2 percent) and CT, Indiana, Minnesota, North Carolina, and West Virginia (-0.1 percent each).
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But another sector where the state has suffered is in the category of business and professional services, which includes scientific and technical jobs, many of those from Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as the federal contractors that do business with them. The McAllen-Edinburg-Mission area had the highest jobless rate in Texas at 7.4 percent, according to agency figures.
