Pfizer is cutting 150 jobs in Portage while Kroger plans thousands of corporate reductions. Michigan shows how a labor market can remain far from recession-level unemployment and still become substantially harder for workers to navigate.

Michigan’s unemployment rate reached 5% in August, placing it behind only California, Connecticut, Oregon and the District of Columbia among the country’s highest jobless rates, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national rate that month was 4.1%. But Michigan’s number does not describe a state experiencing mass unemployment. It points instead to something less dramatic and increasingly familiar: companies are becoming more cautious about hiring at the same time that individual employers are beginning to make significant workforce reductions.

That combination is showing up clearly around Kalamazoo. Pfizer is eliminating 150 positions at its Portage manufacturing operation, telling local station WWMT that lower demand for some of the products made there has reduced production volumes. The cuts stand out partly because the Portage campus has long represented the opposite story. Pfizer previously invested hundreds of millions of dollars there, describing the facility as one of its major global manufacturing centers and projecting hundreds of additional jobs as it expanded sterile injectable production.