Pa. unemployment ticks up a bit, still down over past year [graphs]

The rate of unemployment in Pennsylvania rose for the first time in two years in July. A one-tenth of a percentage point rise brought the jobless rate to 5.7 percent last month.  

Overall, though, unemployment was down 1.8 percent over last July.

That’s good news, says  Neeta Fogg, a research professor at Drexel’s Center for Labor Markets and Policy. But she adds an asterisk — the high number of people who stopped looking for work in the past year.

“The employment increase was 39,000 — the number of employed people — but the number of people who quit the labor force was 86,000.”

Secondly, she said, the slight uptick in unemployment represents a general tapering off of growth, or what she calls “the good news” since April.

She suggests one possibility is that job growth in the spring could have stemmed from pent-up demand during a difficult winter, and trends may be returning to a more gradual increase.