The number of new applications for unemployment benefits ticked up to 870,000 last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, as the number of claims has barely budged over the past four weeks.
Jobless claims for the prior week were 860,000. Forecasters had projected 840,000 new claims.
Jobless claims fell below the psychologically important 1 million mark at the end of August, but have not moved significantly since.
New weekly claims remain extremely high by historical standards. As the coronavirus hit the United States and the economy locked down to slow its spread, layoffs and thus weekly claims for unemployment benefits skyrocketed in late March to as high as 6.9 million.
The number of beneficiaries then dropped precipitously through the end of May as many workers returned to the job, but that decline stalled at the end of summer.
As a result, recent weeks have seen nearly 30 million workers claiming benefits of all kinds and durations. The total unadjusted number of people claiming benefits from all programs for the week ending Sept. 5 was over 26 million. For comparison, roughly 1.5 million people claimed benefits in the same week in 2019.
That number is thought to overstate the true extent of unemployment, though, as errors, double counting, and fraud could have added millions of incorrect claims, according to the New York Times.
One area of concern is the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which provides for unemployment insurance for people sidelined by the epidemic who normally wouldn’t be eligible for benefits, such as gig workers whose business dried up. The Labor Department reports that over 11 million jobless workers are eligible for the benefit, but economists say that number could be off by millions.
Over 680,000 newly claimed this benefit last week, which is quite close to the number of claims for regular unemployment benefits.
One potential reason for the overstatement in claims is that the states feed the Labor Department their number of jobless workers. In some cases, that number includes people who have repeatedly filed for benefits because they have yet to receive them due to state unemployment offices being severely backlogged in approving applications.
Hiring has slowed in many parts of the country as the pace of states reopening their economies has decelerated when compared to earlier this year.
“We’re getting to that point where the easy hiring is behind us,” Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the Wall Street Journal.
One effect of the slowed hiring pace is jobless workers have exhausted their regular unemployment insurance and are now receiving extended benefits. Nearly 280,000 jobless workers filed for this benefit for the week ending Sept. 5, which is roughly 60,000 more than who claimed the benefit the week prior.
