Lake County Unemployment Jumps Full Percentage Point; Brookings Improves

I thought maybe Lake County had a lucky labor market trend on the way. Then the state Department of Labor issued its city and county stats for April. The good news is that Lake County added 130 new jobs between March and April. The bad news is that we gained 215 people in our available workforce. The result: 85 more unemployed people, a full percentage point jump to 6.3%. The only major South Dakota cities with higher unemployment are Watertown (8.8%) and Yankton (6.6%), both of which have taken similar hits to Madison in their manufacturing sectors.

Continuing our comparison with the nearest college town, we find Brookings County experienced a 0.7% decrease in unemployment in April, to 2.8%. Hmm... I thought everyone was caught up in this economic slowdown....