Royal Oak Tribune

Jobless claims edge higher

No coronaviru­s relief in sight

- By Charles Crumm ccrumm@medianewsg­roup.com @crummc on Twitter

New jobless claims in Michigan rose last week while new claims nationally fell.

There were 16,073 new jobless claims in Michigan for the week ending Oct. 24, an increase over the previous week and an indication that layoffs are continuing in the absence of further pandemic assistance from

Congress in the days ahead of the presidenti­al election.

Michigan’s new jobless claims for the previous week were also revised upward, according to the most recent numbers released Thursday by the U.S. Labor Department.

Nationally, 751,000 new jobless claims were filed, about 40,000 less than analysts had anticipate­d and below the million mark for the ninth week.

The unemployme­nt numbers indicate that some of the unemployed have gone back to work, but many people have exhausted state unemployme­nt benefits and are relying on extended federal unemployme­nt benefits after more than seven months of coronaviru­s-induced joblessnes­s.

Continuing jobless claims lag reporting of initial jobless claims by a week.

In Michigan, continuing claims fell to 213,811 for the week ending Oct. 17, and the state’s unemployme­nt rate dipped to 4.97%.

The Michigan Unemployme­nt Insurance Agency launched a dashboard Thursday that shows how many people have filed unemployme­nt claims since the pandemic began in March, and how much has been paid out.

The state has processed 2,907,537 unique jobless claims so far, indicating that 67% of the state’s la

bor force has has experience­d at least short-term layoffs.

To date, $25.5 billion in claims has been paid out.

The state’s dashboard shows that 287,400 people aren’t eligible to file unemployme­nt claims.

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