New unemployment numbers released Thursday morning by the federal government show 881,000 Americans filed weekly jobless claims last week.
This is the first time in three weeks the number has fallen below 1 million. The nation’s unemployment rate is 9.1%. All total, 13.3 million people are continuing to receive traditional jobless benefits, up from 1.7 million a year ago.
The roughly 1 million people who keep applying for unemployment aid each week points to a sluggish pace of improvement. Before the pandemic struck the economy in March, the number of people seeking jobless aid had never topped 700,000 in a week, not even during the depths of the 2007-2009 Great Recession. The economy has recovered 9.3 million, or only 42%, of the jobs that were lost in March and April.
The most recent layoffs follow the expiration of a $600 weekly federal check that supplied critical support for the unemployed. The Trump administration is providing a $300-a-week benefit to replace it, though some of the unemployed won’t qualify.
On Friday, when the government issues the jobs report for August, it’s expected to report that employers added roughly 1.4 million jobs last month. That would still leave the economy about 13 million jobs short of the number it’s lost to the pandemic.
The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending Aug. 15 were Hawaii (18.6), Nevada (16.4), California (16.3), Puerto Rico (16.1), New York (15.2), Connecticut (14.0), Louisiana (13.3), Georgia (12.6), the Virgin Islands (11.8), District of Columbia (11.7) and Massachusetts (11.7).
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