Last week, more than 1 million Americans filed for jobless insurance as the coronavirus pandemic continued to cause retrenchments across the country.
For the week ending Saturday, US unemployment claims totaled 1.5 million, the Labor Department said Thursday. That fell slightly short of a median analyst projection of 1.6 million.
The figure raised the total in 12 weeks to 44 million, which means more than one in four American workers became unemployed during the global health crisis. It's also over the roughly 37 million people who filed jobless-insurance claims during the Great Recession that lasted for a year and a half.
And in another blunt reality check, those who rely on unemployment benefits after the first week, known as continuing claims, are still hovering around a whopping 21 million.
Data from Thursday served as a reminder of the long road to recovery ahead for the US economy, despite a solid bounce-back in last month's hiring. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell confirmed the same on Wednesday in a webcast with a member of the press.
The US officially fell into recession in February this year, the National Bureau of Economic Research said earlier this week, marking the end of a historic 128-month expansion that began in June 2009. Most economists expect the US employment sector to take years to normalize.
On Wednesday, the central bank painted a grim economic view, releasing new predictions that unemployment will drop to 9.3 percent by end of the year and 6.5 percent by end of 2021. The Fed also sees the economy contracting 6.5 percent in the next coming months, before a slight rebound and a 5 percent increase next year.
Since peaking at nearly 7 million in late March, new applications for benefits have dwindled, but they remain extremely high. Before the pandemic paralyzed the US economy in March, new claims in the low 200,000s were running and sat near a 50-year low.
The number of people currently receiving typical jobless compensation dropped marginally in the week of May 30 in a positive sign that suggests more employees are returning to their jobs. Such so-called continuing claims are posted with a lag of one week.
Alternate data sources revealed that, in June, the US labor market continues to rebound at a healthy rate. A report released on Tuesday by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank found that US jobs fell by 8.75 percent from January to June 5, an increase from the 15.08 percent decline in the middle of April.
