State jobless claims rise, statewide recovery is elusive

California lags nation for recovering from coronavirus-linked job losses

California is lagging the nation in recovering its lost jobs, and new unemployment claims continue to rise.

An estimated 230,400 workers in California filed for unemployment benefits last week, up 4,000 from the week before, the U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday. After briefly dipping below the 200,000 mark in late August, claims have been well above that level for the last four weeks.

But more tellingly, California accounted for a whopping 27 percent of the 870,000 jobless filings nationwide.

Other measures show that a vast gulf has emerged from what the California economy is today and what it was before state and local government agencies began to impose business shutdowns to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

Video: Another 870,000 Americans filed first-time jobless claims

California lags the United States badly in recovering jobs that were lost in March and April, the worst months for job losses amid the lockdowns.

While the United States has bounced back to recover nearly half of the 22.16 million jobs it lost in March and April, California has recovered only about one-third of the 2.62 million jobs it lost during the two brutal months.

“California has definitely been rebounding at a much slower pace than the United States,” said Jeffrey Michael, director of the Stockton-based Center for Business and Policy Research at the University of the Pacific. “It’s a very slow recovery in California.”

The statewide unemployment rate, another important measure, also illustrates California’s feeble recovery.

Although California traditionally has a slightly higher jobless rate than the nation, in late 2019 and during the first two months of this year, the state and national rates were comparable.

California achieved a record-low jobless rate of 3.9 percent from August 2019 through February 2020. The United States unemployment rate was also in the vicinity of an all-time record low at 3.6 percent in January and 3.5 percent in February. But once business shutdowns began, jobless rates began to spike.

The national unemployment rate peaked in April at 14.7 percent, the worst level since the Great Depression. In that same month, California experienced an even worse rate, 16.4 percent.

But while the nation in May immediately reported a lower jobless rate of 13.3 percent, California remained stuck at its post Depression record of 16.4 percent.