Another 9,000 Michiganders lost their jobs in October, the seventh straight month of rising unemployment in the Great Lakes State.

“The uptick in Michigan’s jobless rate reflected a decrease in the workforce and an increase in unemployment over the month,” Wayne Rourke, labor market information director for the Michigan Center for Data and Analytics, said in a statement. “Total payroll jobs in the state also reeded slightly since September.”

Michigan’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate jumped two-tenths of a percentage point since September to come in at 4.7% for October, with employment down 9,000 over the month, unemployment up by 6,000 and a workforce decline of 3,000.

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That compares to a national unemployment rate of 4.1% that went unchanged between September and October. Over the last year, Michigan’s unemployment rate has increased by a half a percentage point, while the national rate is up 0.3 percentage points. In the Detroit metropolitan area, Michigan’s largest, the unemployment rate is up 0.7 percentage points over the year.

Total unemployment in Michigan is now up 11.9% from October 2023, compared to a national increase of 8.4%.

From September to October, total payroll jobs declined by 1,000, due in large part to the loss of 5,000 jobs in leisure and hospitality. While Michigan has gained jobs in some sectors like construction and private education and health services over the last year, the largest gain was government employment, up 19,000 jobs.

“There’s no question that the economy is slowing,” Patrick Anderson, CEO of the East Lansing-based consulting firm Anderson Economic Group, told The Detroit News. “I’m not declaring there’s a recession, but it’s pretty clear that there has been a slowdown in the economy across the country over the last six months, if not a year, and that’s been accentuated by a loss of a lot of private sector jobs for Michigan.”

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Anderson and others point to Michigan’s heavy reliance on an automobile industry that’s already struggling amid a government-imposed transition to electric vehicles.

“When there’s a recession, the first thing that a lot of American consumers do is put off buying a new car,” Anderson said.

Tim Nash, director of the McNair Center for Free Enterprise at Northwood University, agreed the problem “currently and moving forward are the announced layoffs in the auto industry, much of them around the future of electric vehicles.”

“General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have announced or (are) considering layoffs,” he told The News. “This will clearly impact their suppliers downstream as well.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and allied Democrats who control the Michigan Legislature have invested billions of tax dollars in the EV industry, but a June analysis by Bridge Michigan found that out of the first $1 billion spent, only about 200 out of 12,000 promised jobs have materialized.

“What you see in Michigan, with government jobs growing and education and health services growing, is the same pattern we’ve seen across the country over the last year, where the private sector is sluggish to declining, and the government is adding jobs,” Anderson said, adding that “the mismatch between the government growing while the tax base is shrinking is something that’s worrying.”

Michigan’s October jobs numbers follow a week after an analysis of weekly unemployment claims by the personal finance website WalletHub found only three states are posting bigger increases than Michigan: North Dakota, Massachusetts, and Kansas.

Michigan’s 43.35% jump in claims from the week of Oct. 21 to the week of Oct. 28 was by far the worst in the Great Lakes region, more than double the increase in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, and well ahead of Ohio. New York and Indiana both posted declining claims.

Perhaps even more concerning, the Great Lakes State ranked second among all states for new unemployment claims per 100,000 people in the labor force, just behind Alaska.