New jobless claims see slight drop to 1.3M

Expanded benefits for so-called gig workers continue to rise in Illinois

A homeless person panhandles in Chicago a year ago. (Shutterstock)

By Ted Cox

New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits dropped to 1.3 million last week, but remained almost double the previous record set before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. Labor Department released its weekly unemployment report Thursday, finding that 1.3 million idled U.S. workers filed for benefits last week, down almost 100,000 from the 1.4 million who filed the week before. That’s the lowest one-week number since a record 3.3 million filed in mid-March, but it was still almost double the pre-COVID record of 695,000 in a week set during the 1982 recession.

Every week in between has been multiple times higher than that previous record, peaking at 6.9 million the last full week of March.

In Illinois, according the Labor Department, new claims dropped to 38,897 last week, down from 45,752 the week before. But expanded claims for so-called gig workers, independent contractors, and freelancers under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program rose for the second straight week, to 42,785 from 32,587.

After the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics set the national unemployment rate at 11.1 percent for June, the Labor Department reported Thursday that “the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 12.4 percent for the week ending June 27, a decrease of 0.5 percentage point from the previous week's revised rate. The previous week's rate was revised down by 0.3 from 13.2 to 12.9 percent.”

According to the department, “The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending June 20 was 32,922,335, an increase of 1,410,788 from the previous week,” and dwarfing the 1.6 million claiming benefits in all programs for the same week in 2019.