The waves of layoffs caused by the coronavirus pandemic continue with nearly 36.5 million Americans now thrown out of work in a US economy still paralyzed by business shutdowns.
Another 2.98 million laid-off workers applied for unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said on Thursday.
It adds to the 33 million who have sought aid in the two months since the coronavirus first forced millions of businesses to close their doors and shrink their workforces.
The number of first-time applications, however, has now declined for six straight weeks, suggesting that a dwindling number of companies are reducing their payrolls.
By historical standards, though, the latest tally shows that the number of weekly jobless claims remains enormous, reflecting an economy that is sinking into a severe downturn.
Last week’s pace of new applications for aid is still four times the record high that prevailed before the coronavirus struck hard in March.
Another 2.98 million laid-off workers applied for unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said on Thursday, adding to the 33 million who sought aid in the previous seven weeks
The waves of layoffs caused by the coronavirus pandemic continue with nearly 36.5 million Americans now thrown out of work in a US economy still paralyzed by business shutdowns
Jobless workers in some states are still reporting difficulty applying for or receiving benefits. These include freelance, gig and self-employed workers, who became newly eligible for jobless aid this year.
The states that are now easing lockdowns are doing so in varied ways.
Ohio has permitted warehouses, most offices, factories, and construction companies to reopen but restaurants and bars remain closed for indoor sit-down service.
A handful of states have gone further, including Georgia, which has opened barber shops, bowling alleys, tattoo parlors and gyms.
South Carolina has reopened beach hotels and Texas has reopened shopping malls.
Data from private firms suggest that some previously laid-off workers have started to return to small businesses in those states, though the number of applications for unemployment benefits remains high.
The latest jobless claims follow a devastating jobs report last week when the government said the unemployment rate soared to 14.7% in April, the highest rate since the Great Depression, and employers shed a stunning 20.5 million jobs.
A decade’s worth of job growth was wiped out in a single month.
The waves of layoffs caused by the coronavirus pandemic continue with nearly 36.5 million Americans now thrown out of work in a US economy still paralyzed by business shutdowns
But even those figures failed to capture the full scale of the damage with the government saying many workers in April were counted as employed but absent from work when they should have been counted as temporarily unemployed.
Millions of other laid-off workers didn’t look for a new job in April, likely discouraged by their prospects in a mostly shuttered economy, and weren’t included, either.
If all those people had been counted as unemployed, the jobless rate would have reached nearly 24%.
The weekly jobless claims report, the most timely data on the economy’s health, cements economists’ expectations for a third straight month of massive job losses in May.
In addition to workers in industries and jobs not initially affected by the coronavirus shutdowns, economists attribute the continued elevation in claims to the processing of application backlogs, which accumulated as state unemployment offices were overwhelmed by the unprecedented wave of filings.
Economists do not anticipate a dramatic improvement in the labor market.
It came a day after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned of an ‘extended period’ of weak growth and stagnant incomes.
‘We are on the back end of the first wave of layoffs, but now we are transitioning from the natural-disaster phase to the recession phase,’ said Josh Wright, chief economist at Wrightside Advisors in New York.
‘That’s why so many white collar jobs are still being lost. We effectively amputated a large section of the economy, and we are going to limp along afterwards.’
The latest jobless claims follow a devastating jobs report last week when the government said the unemployment rate soared to 14.7% in April, the highest rate since the Great Depression, and employers shed a stunning 20.5 million jobs
The Labor Department’s closely watched monthly employment report released last week showed the unemployment rate spiked to 14.7 percent last month