As jobless claims drop, is CT employment back to normal?
On Monday, the state Department of Labor reported 600 fewer people received unemployment assistance the first week of November, pushing the total to about 44,300 beneficiaries. It was the first time since June that Connecticut’s weekly decline did not total at least 1,000 people.
Heading into mid-November, Connecticut was on the cusp of unemployment claims dropping below what the state was paying out in the weeks leading up to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
On Monday, the state Department of Labor reported 600 fewer people received unemployment assistance the first week of November, pushing the total to about 44,300 beneficiaries. It was the first time since June that Connecticut’s weekly decline did not total at least 1,000 people.
Any similar drop the second week of November — DOL is still finalizing that data — would nudge Connecticut’s count below the median weekly total for the first two months of 2020, prior to Gov. Ned Lamont’s executive order for most businesses to close to limit transmission of the COVID-19 virus.
Unemployment claims remain well above their levels of November 2019 prior to the pandemic, ranging between 28,000 and 32,000 claims that month. Between March 2020 and this past September, Connecticut processed $9.7 billion in unemployment benefits.
Connecticut’s official unemployment rate was 6.4 percent in October. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates more than 96,300 state residents were looking for work that month.
The Conference Board counted nearly 105,000 open jobs in Connecticut in October, with the New York City research nonprofit tallying its totals from 16,000 websites, including job boards like Indeed and the career pages of individual employers.
Leaving aside questions of qualifications and job appeal, on paper that would leave Connecticut with about 8,700 too few workers to fill those positions. But the actual amount of people without work is larger than the numbers captured in the claims and employment data since some people are choosing not to seek work for varying reasons linked to the pandemic, including health concerns.
Workers and employers got an additional dose of uncertainty this week, after health agencies globally raised alarms of the newest COVID-19 variant, omicron, which early data suggests is highly contagious.
The CEO of Best Buy said last week the company continues to deal with higher numbers of people missing work due to illness. The company has been training staff to branch out into other departments as needed to help provide coverage.
“If they’re not feeling well, we want them to stay home — a model like this allows you to much more flexibly cover for those call-offs,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said on a conference call. “We have more employees than ever in the history of the company that are skilled in multiple areas in the store.”
And whether due to pandemic considerations, the end of seasonal jobs or workers finding better opportunities elsewhere, most other states have a higher rate of workers quitting than in Connecticut, according to ongoing BLS surveys. Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington were the only states where no more than 2.5 percent of workers left their jobs in any single month between June and September.
After a September edict from the Biden administration that companies with 100 or more employees ensure they are vaccinated or tested weekly, a large number reported higher amounts of workers quitting as an alternative to compliance. The order has drawn multiple court challenges.
As of last week, 31 Connecticut state employees had been terminated for not complying with the governor’s vaccine and testing mandates, according to Josh Geballe, chief operating officer in the Lamont administration. Another 35 state workers had been placed on unpaid leave, with just over 40 more in the process of being placed into that status.
“We continue to have several hundred that are in a state of noncompliance, but are working to get compliant because test results are late,” Geballe said last week during a Lamont press conference. “We’re up to almost 84 percent of state employees fully vaccinated, so that’s good news.”