Unemployment in Bartholomew County declined last month from a year ago but was higher than some neighboring counties and the state rate.
The jobless rate in Bartholomew County stood at 4% in July, down from 4.7% in July 2024, according to figures released this week by the Indiana Department of Workforce Development.
Unemployment also declined from 4% to 3.7% in Jackson County and 3.9% to 3.8% in Jennings County over the same period.
Statewide, the unemployment rate was a seasonally adjusted 3.6% in July, down from 4.4% a year earlier. The U.S. jobless rate was a seasonally adjusted 4.2% last month, unchanged from 4.2% in July 2024.
The update from state officials comes as the federal government reported that more Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, but U.S. layoffs remained in the same historically healthy range of the past few years, The Associated Press reported.
Applications for unemployment benefits for the week ending Aug. 16 rose by 11,000 to 235,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s slightly more than the 229,000 new applications that economists had forecast.
Weekly applications for jobless benefits are seen as a proxy for layoffs and have mostly settled in a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since the U.S. began to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic more than three years ago, according to wire reports.
While layoffs remain low by historical comparisons, there has been noticeable deterioration in the labor market this year and mounting evidence that people are having difficulty finding jobs.
U.S. employers added just 73,000 jobs in July, well short of the 115,000 analysts forecast. Worse, revisions to the May and June figures shaved 258,000 jobs off previous estimates and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1%.
Another recent report on the U.S. labor market showed that employers posted 7.4 million job vacancies in June, down from 7.7 million in May, according to wire reports. The number of people quitting their jobs — a sign of confidence in finding a better job — fell in June to the lowest level since December.
Some major companies have announced job cuts this year, including Procter & Gamble, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Google and Facebook parent company Meta. Intel and The Walt Disney Co. also recently announced staff reductions.
Many economists contend that President Donald Trump’s erratic rollout of tariffs against U.S. trading partners has created uncertainty for employers, who have grown reluctant to expand their payrolls, according to wire reports.
The Labor Department’s report Thursday showed that the four-week average of claims, which softens some of the week-to-week swings, rose by 4,500 to 226,500.
The total number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits for the previous week of Aug. 9 jumped by 30,000 to 1.97 million, the most since November 6, 2021.
In Bartholomew County, 21 workers filed initial unemployment claims the week ending Aug. 16, down from 28 the week before, according to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development.
A total of 140 local workers filed continued jobless claims the week ending Aug. 9, down from 148 the previous week, according to the most recent data.
