3.2 million more jobless claims in US, crisis total now at 33 million
Another 3.2 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as the coronavirus crisis sidelined 33 million workers in less than two months, the feds said Thursday.
That suggests one in five US workers tried to join the nation’s unemployment rolls in the last seven weeks as the pandemic gutted the labor force on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.
“If economists are practitioners of a dismal science, this is the most dismal economic data I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank, told The Post. “It’s off the scale in terms of magnitude of what has ever happened before.”
The seasonally adjusted number of initial jobless claims fell for the fifth consecutive week, indicating the layoffs peaked at the end of March, when workers filed 6.8 million claims. Still, last week’s figure slightly outpaced economists’ expectations for 3 million filings.
Also concerning is that the number of people filing continued claims jumped again to a record 22.6 million in the week ending April 25, the US Department of Labor said. The agency’s report also included new data showing 1.3 million people applied in the last two weeks for “Pandemic Unemployment Assistance,” the program created for gig workers and others not traditionally eligible for benefits.
“You are seeing some leveling out of new layoffs and that’s good news,” unemployment insurance expert Andrew Stettner told The Post. “But people are just kind of getting the benefits that they claimed and they’re staying on them.”
Overwhelmed states have scrambled to process a massive flood of unemployment claims as lockdowns meant to curb the coronavirus forced businesses to close and lay off or furlough their workers.
New York — where workers have reported waiting weeks to get unemployment checks — saw an unadjusted total of 195,242 claims last week, down from 219,413 the prior week, according to the feds.
The Empire State has paid more than $5.8 billion in benefits to 1.5 million people since the crisis began, officials said Wednesday. The state Department of Labor says it is also trying to reach 470,084 people who missed out on money because they didn’t submit weekly certifications.
But New Yorkers have continued to report problems with the system, including some who say their claims have been stuck in “pending” status for weeks.
Laid-off restaurant worker Abibou Faye, 33, said he got a payment in early April, but nothing since then even though he’s re-certified his claim each week.
“I’m not getting paid and I’m worried about losing my apartment,” the Bronx resident told The Post. “It’s just crazy that the line is always busy.”
The jobless claim numbers came ahead of the feds’ highly anticipated April jobs report on Friday, which is expected to show the highest US unemployment rate since World War II. Some experts expect it to hit 15 percent, up from 4.4 percent in March.
Payroll firm ADP offered a glimpse of the damage on Wednesday when it said the private sector lost 20.2 million jobs last month, more than double the total for the Great Recession. But neither the company’s report nor the federal survey will show the full impact of the crisis because they only cover the first half of the month.
Shocking though it may be, the unemployment rate will likely understate the pandemic’s toll because it won’t account for the many people who aren’t looking for work, according to experts.
“It’s the hardest one to predict because we just don’t know how people will answer those questions,” said Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank.
“The direct and indirect employment impacts of COVID-19 were beyond what people had the capacity to imagine,” he added.
With Post wires