The unemployment rate for Yuma County has declined from 31.4 percent during the month of July to 29.9 percent for the month of August. Upon receiving the announcement from the Department of Administration, one would consider this to be good news, especially since a decline did occur. However, after taking a deeper look, it I obvious that the decline was not as good as many may originally perceive. The number of people employed in the area had actually decline a bit from the previous month. During the month of July, there were a total of 65,310 people working while during the month of June, only 64,939 individuals in the area were working.

The primary reason that the unemployment numbers have declined is because a large number of people have decided to simply leave the labor force during the month of August and are no longer applying for jobs or seeking employment. The number of people looking for work has dropped, not the number of people who have received a job. In fact, during the month of August, a total of 92,598 people were working in Yuma County. At the same time, there were 27,659 individuals who were still looking for work.

The business services officer for the Yuma Private Industry Council, Patrick Goetz, claims that the activity at the One Stop Career Centers has been quite brisk. According to Goetz, during the month of July, a total of 2,909 people had taken a visit to the centers. In the meantime, for the following month of August, there were 4,238 people who ended up visiting the centers in hopes of finding employment. The Yuma Private Industry Council also held a job fair at the end of August. A total of around 3,300 individuals ended up attending the job fair in hopes of finding the employment they have been seeking for quite some time now. Goetz also says that the YPIC has been able to track layoffs, stating that a total of 453 layoffs have taken place within 13 individual companies.

In the meantime, a number of economists have said that the state of Arizona is going to continue to add jobs for the next ten years. Unfortunately, many of the jobs being added may not necessarily be the kind of job that certain individuals are looking for. In fact, many of the jobs that are going to be created over the next decade will be in fast food and retail, which are often considered to be lower paying jobs. Even so, a low-paying job would be better than no job at all.