Another 4.3 million initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims were filed the week ending April 18—more than 20 times the number filed (212,000) this week of last year. The full Bureau of Labor Statistics report can be found here. Ignoring seasonal adjustments to the data, 24.4 million claims have been filed over the last five weeks, after the volume of weekly claims shot up more than an order of magnitude in mid-March:
- 200,000 claims filed the week ending Mach 7
- 251,000 claims the week ending Mach 14
- 2,920,000 claims the week ending Mach 21
- 6,016,000 claims the week ending Mach 28
- 6,211,000 claims the week ending April 4
- 4,965,000 claims the week ending April 11
- 4,267,000 claims the week ending April 18
More than 1 in 7 workers who were employed in February have since lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance (it’s closer to 1 in 6). This again understates the degree of labor market fallout, because other workers have seen their hours cut or lost jobs without qualifying for UI. The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program enacted by the CAREES Act, which expanded eligibility (e.g., to contract workers) is not yet operational, so eligibility for initial claims is still set by state-level requirements.
Taking these 24.4 million initial claims as a conservative proxy for job losses since the March jobs report, U.S. employment has fallen at least 16.4% since February. For a sense of scale, employment cumulatively fell 6.3% during the 2007-09 recession (in 26 months) and 2% during the 2001 recession (in 29 months). The 2007-09 recession (a.k.a. the “Great Recession”) was by far the worst since the Great Depression, and now we’ve seen more than 2.5 times the degree of job losses experienced in 2007-09 in one-twelfth the time:
There’s also a huge degree of regional heterogeneity in recent job losses. As economist Ernie Tedeschi points out, roughly 1 in 3 workers have lost jobs and filed for UI in Michigan, Kentucky, and Rhode Island:
With today's 4.4 million initial claims print, there have been 25 million more claims since March 21 than we would have expected, about 17% of February US employment.
In states like Michigan, Kentucky, and Rhode Island, claims have been **one-third** of employment. pic.twitter.com/eEfVOT4PTh
— Ernie Tedeschi (@ernietedeschi) April 23, 2020
Some of the initial claims in recent weeks reflect earlier job losses that are just now being processed because of capacity constraints (or terribly run UI systems, see Florida). Economist Heidi Shierholz estimates that about 7 million workers who have filed for claims (29% of the recent filers) have yet to receive them:
What share of workers who applied for UI in this pandemic are actually getting benefits? The data to get at that are lagged a week, but it looks like about 71% are getting benefits. The rest—7 million of them—are still waiting. 3/
— Heidi Shierholz (@hshierholz) April 23, 2020
For more in depth coverage of the initial UI claims and labor market fallout, you should both follow Heidi Shierholz on twitter and read her latest take:
- EPI’s Working Economics Blog (4/23/20): In the last five weeks, more than 24 million workers applied for unemployment insurance benefits by Heidi Shierholz
Visual representation of the bleak, unprecedented nature of the last five weeks, via EPI:
