Arizona's jobless rate is up for the second month in a row.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 5.4 percent in March. It ticked up to 5.5 percent in April. And this week the Department of Administration reported it hit 5.6 percent in May.
The uptick was driven in part by the loss of 6,300 private sector jobs in May. By contrast, Arizona has typically gained about 400 jobs that month since the end of the recession.
Meanwhile, though Arizona's numbers were going up, the national unemployment rate dropped last month three-tenths of a point, to 4.7 percent.
Doug Walls with the Arizona Department of Administration said he could not say whether the state's back-to-back increases are a fluke or a sign of things to come. "We would have to wait to see for a couple of months to see if this is a trend that's going to be reoccurring," he said. "We are seeing more individuals enter into the labor force, which is going to influence the unemployment rate."
Walls suggested one factor could be what he called "frictional unemployment"— or when people quit one job to search for another. "When the unemployment levels become so low, again, that people are more confident in their ability to find other jobs, you're going to always have this rate of unemployment, theoretically," he said.
But whether Arizona's jobless rate can be tied to frictional unemployment remains unclear.
Last May, the state's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 5.8 percent. It hit a high at 10.5 percent in May 2010. But the current 5.6 percent is far from the bottom in recent Arizona history: in May 2007 the unemployment rate was just 3.5 percent.