OUTTA WORK BLUES
Spike in jobless
American workers submitted 853,000 applications for unemployment benefits last week — a surprisingly steep tally as a new wave of coronavirus lockdowns kept the labor market under pressure, the feds said Thursday.
The latest batch of initial jobless claims brought the total reported during the COVID-19 pandemic to roughly 70.5 million — a number larger than the combined populations of California and Texas, the nation’s two most populous states.
“Our fears of a significant economic toll taken by the explosion in the COVID-19 cases have now been matched by a spike in new claims for unemployment benefits,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.
New filings surged from the prior week’s revised total of 716,000 and outpaced economists’ expectations for 720,000 as more parts of the country imposed restrictions to stem a record-setting spike in coronavirus infections.
The San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, started a monthlong lockdown Sunday, and New York City officials have warned citizens vulnerable to the virus to stay home as much as possible.
Such measures could put added pressure on employers, while workers could suffer from the looming expiration of extended unemployment payments and other government benefits meant to help out-of-work Americans.
“After serving to triage the entire economy for the better part of nine months, the imminent end of jobless pay would eviscerate the unemployment safety net at one of the most difficult periods in our nation’s history,” said Andrew Stettner, an unemployment-insurance expert and senior fellow at The Century Foundation, which estimates that 12 million people will be cut off from CARES Act benefits for jobless workers when they expire at the end of the year.
The US Department of Labor’s jobless-claims data were just the latest sign that the labor market’s recovery from the pandemic has slowed since the robust rebound seen in the spring and summer.
The American economy added just 245,000 jobs in November, marking the fifth straight monthly slowdown in hiring amid an alarming resurgence of the coronavirus, the feds said last week.
Experts say the Thanksgiving holiday may be partially responsible for the recent volatility in jobless filings. However, “the trend of more Americans losing jobs is clearly rising over the last month,” said Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union.