Jobless claims fall, but layoffs remain elevated

WASHINGTON » The number of laid-off Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell to a still-elevated 881,000 last week, evidence that the viral pandemic keeps forcing many businesses to slash jobs.

The latest figures, released Thursday by the Labor Department, suggest that nearly six months after the eruption of the coronavirus, the economy is still struggling to sustain a recovery and rebuild a job market that was devastated by the recession. In the previous week, more than 1 million had sought jobless aid.

All told, the government said that 13.3 million people are continuing to receive traditional jobless benefits, up from 1.7 million a year ago.

The nearly 1 million people who keep applying for unemployment aid each week point to a sluggish pace of improvement. Before the pandemic struck the economy in March, the number of people seeking jobless aid had never topped 700,000 in a week, not even during the depths of the 2007-2009 Great Recession. The economy has recovered 9.3 million, or only 42%, of the jobs that were lost in March and April.

“The data show that layoffs remain widespread and the recovery in the labor market is occurring at a frustratingly slow pace,” economists Nancy Vanden Houten and Gregory Daco of Oxford Economics wrote in a research note.

Thursday’s figure, though historically high, marked the lowest number of jobless claims since the viral pandemic first paralyzed the economy in March. But beginning this week, the department tweaked the way it adjusts its calculations to account for seasonal changes, thereby making it difficult to compare last week’s figure with previous weeks’. Unadjusted for seasonal variations, though, the numbers show that 833,000 Americans applied for benefits last week, up from 826,000 the week before.

LM OTERO — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE A customer walks past a now hiring sign at an eatery in Richardson, Texas, earlier this week. The Labor Department reported unemployment numbers Thursday, Sept. 3.