Unemployment claims rocket higher, pointing to a weak job market

Unemployment claims in California have skyrocketed to their highest level in more than a month, officials reported Thursday, a grim sign that coronavirus-linked business shutdowns continue to weaken the state’s frail job market.

California workers filed 158,600 initial claims for unemployment during the week that ended on Feb. 13, up 20,660 from the 137,940 jobless claims filed the week of Feb. 6, the U.S. Labor Department reported.

The weekly claims totals were the highest since Jan. 9, when 182,600 California workers filed initial claims for unemployment.

Nationwide, workers filed 861,000 initial jobless claims last week, up 13,000 from the 848,000 unemployment claims filed in the United States the week before.

California is now accounting for a brutally high percentage of the jobless claims filed in the United States.

Despite having only about 12% of the nation’s labor force, California last week accounted for a jawdropping 18.4% of all the unemployment claims filed in the United States, this news organization’s analysis of the weekly unemployment filings shows.

Only a few weeks ago, on Jan. 23, California claims represented just 6.3% of the filings nationwide. For three consecutive weeks since then, California jobless filings have accounted for a sharply increasing share of the filings nationwide.

Ominously, the pattern of jobless claims in California points to a rising trend in the number of claims being filed by workers in the state.

During the four weeks that ended on Feb. 13, unemployment claims averaged 114,800 a week, up 10,300 from the average amount for the four weeks ending on Feb. 6. A fourweek moving average is used to smooth out weekby-week fluctuations.

For 45 of the last 46 weeks, unemployment claims in California have remained well above the 100,000 level.

Jobless filings have remained at elevated levels since mid-March when state and local government agencies orchestrated wide-ranging business shutdowns to combat the coronavirus.

The upward trend in jobless filings has surfaced at a time when the state Employment Development Department continues to struggle with payments of unemployment claims.

For nearly a year, the EDD has blundered in efforts to pay benefits to unemployed workers in a timely fashion.

On top of all that, in recent months, the EDD has stumbled into pratfalls that opened the floodgates to a massive wave of fraudulent jobless payments and identity theft.