Illinois job growth is on the upswing, but the unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.7 percent in June and the size of the labor force continues to decline.
The state added 8,600 jobs in June, including 900 in manufacturing. Most of the growth was in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and government, according to preliminary estimates released Thursday by the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
The greatest job losses were in education and health services, which lost 2,600 jobs, and construction, which was down 1,000 jobs.
The state also sharply revised its May job growth data to show it gained 11,300 jobs that month, up from 2,400 in preliminary estimates.
But while job gains improved the first half of this year compared with last, the agency expressed concerns that the size of the labor force has declined for the fourth consecutive month. The labor force, which includes anyone who is working or looking for work, in June reached its lowest level since March 2006.
Illinois’ labor force participation rate — the share of the population working or trying to — hit 64.4 percent, the lowest since 1979. The nation’s labor force participation rate was 62.8 percent in June, also back to levels last seen in the late 1970s.
People leave the labor force when they retire, return to school, dedicate themselves to child care or elder care duties, or when they stop looking for work for other reasons, such as illness or frustration.
Meanwhile, Illinois’ unemployment rate, which measures people who are not working but have looked for a job in the past four weeks, rose a notch to 4.7 percent in June from 4.6 percent in May. The U.S. unemployment rate also ticked up over the month, to 4.4 percent from 4.3 percent.
The state’s unemployment rate was down from 5.9 percent a year before and from 5.7 percent in January.
For the Chicago metro area, unemployment rose to 4.3 percent in June from 4.2 percent the month before. The size of its labor force increased for the first time in more than a year and its labor force participation rate rose to 65 percent, from 64.8 percent the month before.
