US jobless claims rise for 1st time in 5 weeks

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans applying for jobless benefits rose for the first time in five weeks even though the economy and job market have been recovering briskly from the pandemic.

Jobless claims edged up by 4,000 to 353,000 from a pandemic low 349,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

The four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week volatility, fell by 11,500 to 366,500 — lowest since mid-march 2020 when the coronavirus was beginning to slam the country.

The weekly count has fallen more or less steadily since topping 900,000 in early January as the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has helped the economy — encouraging businesses to reopen or expand hours and luring consumers out of their homes to restaurants, bars and shops.

“We expect jobless claims to remain on a downward path as the labor market continues to recover, but progress will be more fitful as claims get closer to pre-pandemic levels,” economists Nancy Vanden Houten and Gregory Daco of Oxford Economics said in a research note.

A resurgence of cases linked to the highly contagious delta variant has also clouded the economic outlook. And claims already remain high by historic standards: Before the pandemic tore through the economy in March 2020, the weekly pace amounted to around 220,000 a week.

Filings for jobless benefits have traditionally been seen as a real-time measure of the job market’s health. But their reliability has deteriorated during the pandemic. In many states, the weekly figures have been inflated by fraud and by multiple filings from unemployed Americans as they navigate bureaucratic hurdles to try to obtain benefits. Those complications help explain why the pace of applications remains comparatively high.

The job market has been rebounding with vigor since the pandemic paralyzed economic activity last year and employers slashed more than 22 million jobs in March and April 2020.