COVID-19 unemployment claims bust old record

Almost 3.3 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment last week, blasting past the old record of 700,000 set in 1982

A demonstrator asks a relevant question in the midst of the Great Recession 10 years ago as part of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear organized by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in Washington, D.C. (Flickr/Martha Soukup)

By Ted Cox

Almost 3.3 million workers across the United States filed for unemployment last week — almost five times the previous record.

The U.S. Department of Labor released its weekly unemployment report Thursday. It found that a record 3,283,000 workers filed initial claims for unemployment in the week ending last Saturday. That obliterated the previous record of 695,000 initial claims set in the midst of the Reagan administration’s recession in October 1982.

The Illinois Department of Employment Security announced later in the day that the state had registered 133,000 new claims this month, and Gov. Pritzker said in his daily coronavirus briefing that IDES had successfully registered another 17,000 just Thursday before 2 p.m.

The U.S. Labor Department began releasing weekly reports 50 years ago, meaning of course they don’t go back to the Great Depression in the ‘30s, but even that was almost certainly more gradual and unlikely to top the cataclysmic response to employment caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

New claims rose 3 million from just the previous week. Three weeks ago, 200,000 people filed for unemployment, which The New York Times reported was a “historically low” number.

Analysts said the total was most likely an undercount as well, as the economic collapse has overwhelmed some states like Illinois, while many unsalaried low-wage and part-time workers, including those in the “gig” economy like ride-sharing drivers, aren’t even eligible to apply, although they’re being considered for unemployment in the $2 trillion stimulus package making its way through Congress this week..

Gov. Pritzker has said repeatedly this week that the IDES online filing system has been “overloaded,” and on Wednesday he advised those filing claims to “hang with us here” as technicians bolster the system. He said the bolstered system appeared to be working better on Thursday.

Economic analysts also expect next week’s report to be equally dire.

Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia tried to calm the public by issuing a statement saying: “This large increase in unemployment claims was not unexpected, and results from the recognition by Americans across the country that we have had to temporarily halt certain activities in order to defeat the coronavirus. The hard impact of this on American workers was anticipated in the bill passed by the Senate last night, which provides hundreds of billions of dollars in unprecedented funding for traditional unemployment insurance and pandemic unemployment assistance, and one-time cash payments of $1,200 or more to Americans making $75,000 or less ($150,000 for those who are married). Perhaps more important, the Senate bill also provides incentives and funding for businesses to keep their workers on payroll, so that, as soon as possible, we can spring back to the strong economic conditions we enjoyed just weeks ago.”

Economists estimated that the unemployment rate, which stood at the record 3.5 percent President Trump likes to boast about just two weeks ago, had already risen to 5.5 percent with the new claims and will soon reach double digits and surpass the 10 percent unemployment rate reached during the Great Recession a decade ago.

IDES runs monthly data reports, and a new release put out Thursday found that the state’s unemployment dropped in February to a new record low, 3.4 percent. But IDES also added, “To this point, March unemployment claims total 133,763 compared to 27,493 over the same period in 2019.”

Just last week, IDES reported that of the 13 major metropolitan areas in Illinois, 12 had seen year-to-year declines in unemployment as of January, ranging from 3.4 percent in the college towns of Bloomington-Normal and Champaign-Urbana to 5.4 percent in Kankakee. Only Rockford saw an increase from 6.8 percent last year to 8 percent this January.