Unemployment claims double last week's record: 6.6 million

Labor Sec. Scalia says report ‘reflects the sacrifices American workers are making’ in coronavirus crisis

Chicago’s Diner Grill is one of the many Illinois restaurants shut down by the coronavirus crisis. As of Thursday, it had yet to reopen. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

New nationwide employment claims reported Thursday doubled the record set only last week, with 6.6 million idled American workers filing.

The U.S. Department of Labor also revised last week’s report from just under 3.3 million new unemployment claims to just above that figure, still almost five times the previous one-week record of 695,00, set in 1982 during President Reagan’s first-term recession. This week’s new claims nonetheless doubled that, making a total of almost 10 million people filing for unemployment just in the last two weeks.

The Labor Department report, of course, blamed the exponential escalation on the coronavirus outbreak and the nationwide economic slowdown as more and more U.S. citizens are ordered to stay home to halt the spread of COVID-19. But it reported Thursday that the claims by laid-off workers, “led by accommodation and food services” in the hotel, restaurant, and bar industries, were expanding to other industries as the national economic slowdown spread, including “health care and social assistance, and manufacturing industries, while an increasing number of states identified the retail and wholesale trade and construction industries” as problem areas.

According to the report, claims in Illinois last week climbed to 178,000, a more than 50 percent increase on the 114,000 who filed the week before.

“Similar to last week’s unemployment claims numbers, today’s report reflects the sacrifices American workers are making for their families, neighbors, and country in order to ‘slow the spread,’” said Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia in a statement issued along with the weekly unemployment report.

Scalia said he expected relief packages passed by Congress and signed by President Trump to have an impact, and the Labor Department was trying to accelerate their implementation.

“The administration continues to act quickly to address this impact on American workers,” he said. “That includes a rule the Labor Department adopted yesterday to implement the paid-leave provisions of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, and the department’s work with the states to make available the enhanced unemployment benefits provided in the CARES Act, which the president signed last week. That legislation also contains significant incentives for businesses to retain workers and continue paying them, which will put businesses and workers in a better position to resume work and reboot the economy once the virus is contained.”

According to the department, this week’s actual figure on new claims was 6,648,000, an increase of 3,341,000 from the previous week's revised level, and marks “the highest level of seasonally adjusted initial claims in the history of the seasonally adjusted series.” Over the last two weeks alone, 9.96 million workers filed for unemployment.

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the U.S. unemployment rate stood at a half-century-low of 3.5 percent, but on Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced it had already reached 4.4 percent. Due to a lag in monthly figures on the unemployment rate, that figure doesn’t include the vast majority of the 10 million job losses reported over the last two weeks. Many economists expect the unemployment rate to reach double digits by the end of the month.