The American jobs crisis is escalating again.
Another 965,000 people filed for first-time unemployment benefits on a seasonally adjusted basis in the United States last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
On top of regular claims, 284,470 workers filed claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. The program provides aid to people like the self-employed or gig workers, who aren’t covered under regular benefits. After the new stimulus deal extended the program, it is now slated to end in March.
Added together, initial benefit claims totaled some 1.3 million last week, excluding seasonal adjustments.
That was substantially higher than the previous week, in which 784,000 Americans filed for unemployment benefits.
Weekly first-time jobless claims are stuck at an uncomfortably high level. In late August, the figure dropped below 1 million, but since then, significant improvements have been hard to come by — and last week represented a huge step in the wrong direction.
Continued claims, which count workers who have claimed aid for at least two weeks in a row, stood at 5.3 million in the week ended January 2.
The U.S. job market’s weakness was made painfully clear in the December employment report that the government issued last week. Employers shed jobs for the first time since April as the pandemic tightened its grip on consumers and businesses.
The figures also depicted a sharply uneven job market: The losses last month were concentrated among restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment venues — places that provide in-person services that some governments have restricted or that consumers are avoiding. Educational services, mostly colleges and universities, also cut workers in December. So did film and music studios.
Most other large industries, though, reported job gains. Many economists had expected last spring that job losses would spread to more industries. Though all sectors of the economy initially laid off workers, most of them have avoided deep layoffs. Manufacturing, construction, and professional services like engineering and architecture, for example, all added jobs in December.
At the same time, many companies seem reluctant to ramp up hiring. A government report Tuesday showed that employers advertised fewer open jobs in November than in October. The decline, while small, was widespread across most industries. Even now, the nation has nearly 10 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic sent the economy into a deep recession nearly a year ago, having recovered just 56% of the jobs lost in the spring.
Many economists say that once coronavirus vaccines are more widely distributed, a broader recovery should take hold in the second half of the year. The incoming Biden administration, along with a now fully Democratic-led House and Senate, is also expected to push more rescue aid and spending measures that could accelerate growth.
