#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.
Another 1.48 million workers are newly unemployed
Jun 25. 2020
A person sits at a bus stop next to closed businesses in the New York borough of Brooklyn on June 17, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Dee Delgado.
By The Washington Post · Eli Rosenberg · NATIONAL, BUSINESS, US-GLOBAL-MARKETS
Another 1.48 million people applied for unemployment for the first time last week, a slight decrease from the week before and the 14th straight week that more than one million people have filed for unemployment.
Workers continue to file for jobless claims at record numbers, due to the economic shutdown to stem the spread of the coronavirus. By contrast, in February the weekly claims were roughly 200,000 a week. The previous record was 695,000 jobless claims in 1982.
Another 730,000 people applied for the supplemental pandemic unemployment assistance program created by Congress for self-employed and gig workers for the first time last week, bringing the total number of first-time claims to 2.2 million.
The numbers were higher than analysts’ predictions, adding to a raft of bad news as the country struggles to rebound from the economic and public health crises from the coronavirus.
“It is just deeply disturbing,” said Heidi Shierholz, chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Obama administration. “I do think that people are getting hired back, but we are continuing to see an absolute hemorrhaging of jobs. Just record levels of people.”
The total number of people claiming unemployment last week shrank to 19.5 million, a drop of more than 750,000 from the week before. When including benefits for gig workers, 30.5 million people claimed unemployment insurance of some type last week.
There are signs that some states are still dealing with the backlogs that plagued unemployment systems early in the crisis – making the numbers an imperfect snapshot of the current picture.
In Wisconsin, state officials have warned a backlog of unemployment claims could last until October. Kentucky’s state capitol has been flooded with laid off workers who said they had not been paid since the beginning of the pandemic.
The initial weekly unemployment claims have steadily declined from a weekly peak of 6.9 million at the end of March, which gave some economists hope that the worst of the pandemic’s toll on the economy was over. But rising coronavirus cases in many parts of the country have begun to raise fears of continued shutdowns.
There are concerns about more issues when the supplemental $600 unemployment bonus runs out at the end of July. While some lawmakers have expressed concerns that the payments pose an incentive for some to remain unemployed, a study released looking at data from 2013 to 2019 this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed the opposite: That those collecting jobless benefits search for jobs more than twice as intensely as those who have exhausted their benefits.
Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, likened the situation to a classic war film, “Tora, Tora, Tora,” which depicts a Navy captain refusing to act in defense of Pearl Harbor until he received confirmation of an attack was coming from, as ships exploded around him.
“I think that’s a pretty good allegory for where we’re at right now,” he said. “We have 30 million people on unemployment insurance, yet major decision-makers are asking for more confirmation that more aid is necessary. It’s sitting out in plain site – they just don’t want to look at it.”
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