The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell to a four-month low last week as improvements in public health and the environment allowed more segments of the economy to reopen, putting the labor market’s recovery back on track, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
People who lost their jobs after the collapse of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City on 19 March 2009 queue up to claim unemployment benefits. The deep scars left by the COVID 19 pandemics will take years to heal fully, as demonstrated by the fact that a staggering 20.1 million Americans received unemployment benefits II at the end of February. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 38 million Americans registered as newly unemployed in the first half of this year, up from 19.5 million in January.
When Congress passed the CARES Act in March, a law that expanded unemployment insurance in response to the COVID 19 pandemic, the law greatly expanded eligibility for workers affected by CO VID 19. The law created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, modeled after the existing Disaster Unemployment Assistance Program (DUA), which provides UI benefits to many workers who would not normally qualify for the state’s UI program. For example, if an employee is self-employed – or works part-time – but was also a full-time student before and during the pandemic, the extended entitlement to UIs enshrined in the CARES Act will benefit a large number of workers, many of whom were full-time students before and / or during this pandemic. UI to promote eligibility of all workers affected by CoVID 19 and significantly increase the level of assistance provided.
The original application is a new application made by a person applying for UI benefits on behalf of a colleague – a full-time worker during the CoVID pandemic 19.
The claims report also shows that the number of people receiving benefits in the first week of aid fell by 193,000 to 4.144 million in the week to February 27, down from 3.5 million the previous week. Initial claims for UI benefits rose to about 6.9 million within a week of the outbreak of COVID pandemic 19, compared with about 2.7 million in the weeks before, when jobs were closed due to lockdown measures aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Although initial claims have since fallen, they remain above a million a week, according to the report.
The decline largely reflects people who have exhausted their eligibility for benefits, which is limited to 26 weeks in most states. The decline largely reflects the number of people using their eligible benefits after eligibility was limited by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines.
As the number of new claims declines, the number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits is rising. In the week ending February 20, about 5.455 million people were eligible for the government-funded extended benefits program, up from 4.5 million in the same week last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total number of claims for unemployment insurance and other benefits rose to 2.077 million, 1.8 million more than the previous week.
Earlier this month, some 17 million workers received benefits from several programs, including the Coronavirus Relief Package, which came into effect in March. Since September, the eligibility for extended unemployment benefits has been expanded, increasing by $300 a week for each state that approves the amount. With the extension by the federal government, people can receive payments for about 18 months.
Nearly 17 million Americans have received benefits from these programs since the end of March, according to the U.S. Labor Department. These include unemployment insurance, social security benefits and the Coronavirus assistance package, the latter of which offers extended benefits to those who have exhausted their unemployment benefit entitlements under the previous programme.
In Illinois, new applications fell by about 56,000 last week, unadjusted, and Ohio fell by 46,500, according to the U.S. Labor Department. This followed a similar drop in claims last week in New York and New Jersey, both of which saw declines of more than 20% from the previous week’s lows, while new claims in Virginia and Ohio also fell, but by more than 20,000 each.
In most other states that saw declines, applications fell by less than 10,000, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Meanwhile, states that have recently had high insured unemployment rates continue to lead by this measure. The uninsured unemployment rate is the percentage of people who have applied for unemployment benefits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the last 12 months.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 42,000 to a seasonally adjusted 712,000 in the week ending March 6, the lowest level since early November, a drop of 6.5 percent from the previous week, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Data from the previous week were revised to show that 9,000 more applications were received than previously reported, down from 9500.
