May 21, 2020 | 8:36am | Updated May 21, 2020 | 11:55am
Another 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as the number of workers sidelined by the coronavirus crisis topped 38 million, new federal data show.
That indicates almost a quarter of the US workforce has tried to join the nation’s unemployment rolls in the past nine weeks as the pandemic kneecapped the global economy.
It also means more workers have submitted initial jobless claims in the last nine weeks than in the 18 months of the Great Recession, when about 37 million claims were filed.
“The seismic impact should not be dismissed because earlier shock waves were larger,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst for Bankrate. “Many of these filers seeking unemployment benefits are not solitary in their suffering.”
While the US Department of Labor’s seasonally adjusted weekly totals have fallen steadily since late March, they indicate layoffs have continued during the pandemic while states slogged through backlogs of applications.
The latest numbers were in line with economists’ expectations for 2.4 million claims. The feds also revised the prior week’s total down to 2.6 million from about 3 million after Connecticut misreported its figures.
But the number of continued claims for unemployment benefits surged to more than 25 million in the week ending May 9, the feds said, suggesting many workers have not returned to their jobs since being laid off or furloughed amid lockdowns aimed at curbing the coronavirus.
And some 6.1 million people were collecting “Pandemic Unemployment Assistance” for gig workers and others not traditionally eligible for benefits in the week ending May 2, a roughly 80 percent jump from the prior week.
The silver lining to those grim numbers is that states appear to be catching up with the flood of claims that roiled some offices in recent weeks, according to unemployment insurance expert Andrew Stettner.
“It is good evidence that more people are moving through the process and getting on benefits,” Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, told The Post.
But, he added, “There’s still a lot of people waiting out there, way too many.”
There are thousands of outstanding claims in New York, where initial jobless filings jumped to an unadjusted 226,521 last week from 199,419 the prior week, according to federal data.
As of Wednesday, the state’s Department of Labor had yet to process 7,580 claims that were at least four weeks old, according to officials. The agency said it is trying to reach the people who filed those claims, which had missing or incorrect information, were duplicates or had been abandoned.
Another 20,801 applications filed before April 22 had been processed but not paid because the workers had not submitted required certifications, officials said.
The latest jobless claims were filed in the same week as the feds’ monthly employment survey that will be used to generate the closely watched jobs report for May. April’s survey showed unemployment spiking to a record 14.7 percent as the economy shed more than 20 million jobs, the worst losses since the Great Depression.as the economy shed more than 20 million jobs, the worst losses since the Great Depression.
With Post wires
