A record 6.65 million Americans filed unemployment claims last week. Before the coronavirus, weekly jobless claims had never exceeded 700,000
Unemployment takes work. Photo: Jose Sanchez/AP/Shutterstock Before COVID-19 came to these shores, no more than 700,000 Americans had ever filed for unemployment benefits in a single week. In the seven-day span that ended on March 21, about 3.3 million did. Economists expected last week to be similarly brutal, with their consensus estimate projecting that another 3.1 million in jobless claims.
All states saw a sharp increase in their unemployment rolls, but the largest were recorded in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massachusetts. Given the extraordinary volume of claims inundating states’ unemployment insurance offices, it is unclear whether state-level variation solely reflects economic discrepancies.
Taken together, the job losses of the past three weeks imply a real-time unemployment rate of 10.1 percent, matching the highest level of joblessness America experienced during the Great Recession. Earlier this week, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis projected that unemployment could reach as high as 32.1 percent before the pandemic-induced recession is through.
Laid-off workers are eligible for enhanced unemployment benefits that will leave low-to-middle income laborers at least as well off as they were on the job, thanks to the $2 trillion stimulus package that Congress enacted last week. But that relief package did little to address the plight of workers who were planning to enter the labor market this spring, such as new college graduates, or for undocumented workers, among myriad other embattled constituencies.
Nevertheless, Congress decided last week to depart for a monthlong vacation, and will not be back in session until April 20.
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