Virginia jobless rate rises for 7th month

• The past three months saw the weakest job creation in the U.S., outside of the pandemic, since 2010 in the wake of the global financial crisis.

By the numbers: Virginia's unemployment rate hit 3.6% in July, up from 3.5% in June, per preliminary and seasonally adjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics data out last week.

• That's still lower than the national unemployment rate, which has hovered between 4% and 4.2% for the past 12 months.
• A year ago, Virginia's rate was 2.8%.

The big picture: South Dakota (1.9% unemployment), North Dakota (2.5%) and Vermont (2.6%) had July's lowest unemployment rates, BLS data shows..

• D.C. (6%); California (5.5%) and Nevada (5.4%) had the highest.

In D.C., the Trump administration's purge of federal workers is driving much of those jobless numbers; its unemployment rate led the nation for the third straight month.

Threat level: A quarter of unemployed workers have been out of a job for 27 weeks (that's six months) or longer, per a new analysis of government data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

• That's the highest since February 2022.
• This weak job market is hitting new grads hard, the report found. 13.4% of unemployed Americans in July were "new labor force entrants."

Meanwhile, the white-collar employment picture is also bleak. Employment in professional and business services has steadily declined this year, after surging in the post-pandemic era, Peck reports.

• Employees are reporting high job anxiety. There's also increasing fear that AI will come for their jobs.

Yes, but: There's some good news for job seekers in the state's latest monthly unemployment data.

• Unlike the previous month's report that showed Virginia lost 8,400 jobs between May and June, last week's report showed Virginia added 600 in July.

What we're watching: "Job hugging" is the latest employment trend that's replaced job hopping in this era of rising unemployment and challenging job prospects.