Job loss claims at 33M in seven weeks
Economists hope June will bring rebound
In less than two months, the number of Americans losing their jobs and filing for unemployment has reached staggering heights.
As the economy reels from coronavirus shutdowns, more than 33 million people have applied for benefits in seven weeks, a tally that signals what is almost certain to be the worst unemployment rate ever seen when the government reports that figure Friday.
Roughly 3.2 million people filed for unemployment last week alone, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was fewer than the 3.8 million who filed the week before and down from the alltime high of 6.86 million applications in late March.
The number who sought assistance through March and April exceeds all the jobs created since the Great Recession. April is expected to be the grimmest month so far.
Unemployment is expected to have spiked to a record 15% to 20%, a devastating confirmation of the toll the coronavirus pandemic has taken on the economy.
“At the low end, the jobs losses in April will most certainly have canceled out all of the gains in the recovery from the Great Recession,” Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a blog post. “At the high end, we will have returned to a level of employment last experienced in the mid-1990s, canceling out all of the gains in employment over the last 25 years.”
The economy began to shut down in March as stores closed their doors, travel ground to a virtual halt and residents were told to stay home to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
BofA Global Research forecasts that 22 million nonfarm jobs were lost in April, boosting the unemployment rate to 15%.
Oxford Economics expected the numbers to be even worse: 28 million jobs shed and an unemployment rate of 17%.
The April report may still not give a full picture of the nation’s unemployment landscape, because traditional measures used to count those who are out of work are insufficient to measure the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
For instance, workers are typically counted as unemployed if they’re out of a job and trying to find another. But many Americans have been unable to look for work while so many businesses are shut down.