New unemployment claims level at 1.5M
Illinois claims flat as Pritzker announces $900M in COVID relief grants
Gov. Pritzker announces $900 million in coronavirus relief grants at a news conference Wednesday in Chicago. (Facebook/Gov. J.B. Pritzker)
By Ted Cox
New unemployment claims remained flat week to week both nationally and in Illinois in U.S. Department of Labor figures released Thursday.
The Labor Department reported that 1.5 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment benefits last week, down just 58,000 from revised figures from the week before. That made 45.5 million claims filed nationally since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in mid-March. The 1.5 million new claims were the lowest one-week total since 3.3 million filed in mid-March, but still remained more than double the previous one-week record of 695,000 recorded in the 1982 recession. In between, a record 6.9 million filed the last full week of March.
New Illinois claims for the week were almost exactly level at 44,639, up 33 from the week before. New claims for expanded benefits under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program dropped below 9,000 to 8,987, 77 fewer than the week before.
The news came after Gov. Pritzker announced $900 million in new state COVID-relief grants on Wednesday, intended to bolster “communities and businesses impacted by the pandemic and recent civil unrest,” according to a news release.
The wide-ranging grants, some funded by federal coronavirus relief packages, extend across 10 programs administered by four state agencies. They include $150 million for “emergency rental assistance to Illinois tenants who are unable to pay their rent,” with grants of up to $5,000 for renters, administered through the Illinois Housing Development Authority, and another $150 million under IHDA for mortgage assistance, with grants of up to $15,000 “expected to assist approximately 10,000 eligible homeowners who are unable to pay their mortgage.”
“We are in a moment that requires a historic effort to mitigate this virus’s devastating effects on the health and livelihoods of the residents of this state,” Pritzker said. “We must do so in a way that prioritizes those who were hurting long before we’d ever heard of COVID-19 — to be there for people who are in need, people who are falling through the cracks, people who never expected themselves to need a helping hand from anyone else — but now they do. With assistance from the federal CARES Act and in partnership with the General Assembly, including from the Black Caucus, Latino Caucus, and Asian Caucus, my administration has put together a support package of over $900 million to lift up small businesses, working families, and black and brown communities who have been hit the hardest by COVID-19’s financial impacts. I’m deeply proud to lead a state government so committed to being there for the people we serve.”
Other grant programs include $60 million for “businesses experiencing losses or business interruption as a result of COVID-19-related closures,” federally funded under the CARES Act and with a priority placed on child-care centers. Another $25 million grant program is targeted to help businesses rebuild from damage sustained in the wake of last month’s police protests, and another $32.5 million to “immediately mitigate poverty in Illinois and respond to the needs of hard-hit communities by COVID-19 and by the civil unrest,” expected to provide support to more than 73,000 people statewide. Some $11.5 million of that will go directly to needy families in the form of one-time payments of $500 to “help ensure food security.” Another $5 million will go to seniors “in need of meals, groceries, medicine, and medical care.”
Nationally, according to the Labor Department, “the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 14.1 percent for the week ending June 6, unchanged from the previous week's revised rate.” The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics set the May unemployment rate at 13.3 percent for May, although analysts insist that number would be higher if the bureau included workers who aren’t even looking for jobs in the pandemic.
The Labor Department reported that more than 29 million idled workers were receiving unemployment benefits of some sort at the end of May, up from 1.6 million across the nation for the same week a year ago.