New unemployment claims at pandemic low

Filings dropped below 1.2M last week, while claims in Illinois also declined

Economic activity is slowly resuming, as at this restaurant using a parking lot as a dining area in Chicago. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

New claims for unemployment insurance dropped last week to the lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March, but even so another 1.2 million idled workers filed for benefits.

The decline snapped a two-week increase in filings, according to U.S. Labor Department figures released Thursday. But it still means that filings remain at levels unseen before the stay-at-home orders imposed to curtail the spread of COVID-19.

New one-week filings in March smashed the previous record of 695,000 set during the 1982 recession when 3.3 million workers were idled in mid-March, soon topped by the new record of 6.9 million set the last full week of the month. New claims then steadily declined for months before the rises the last two weeks. The new drop to 1.2 million last week was a sign of improvement, but also continuing hardship — still almost twice the pre-COVID one-week record.

Illinois saw continued progress, however, with one-week claims for unemployment dropping by a quarter, to 25,000 from 33,000 the week before. Claims for expanded federal benefits for independent contractors, freelancers, and so-called gig workers under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program also declined to 6,600, down from 7,300 the week before.

State claims in the PUA program spiked last month, then suddenly returned to low levels last week. Gov. Pritzker has said the entire nationwide program has been subject to fraud. On Wednesday, he said the Illinois Department of Employment Security was investigating 120,000 possible cases of unemployment fraud, 107,000 of them in the PUA program. The governor said the federal PUA program was “poorly designed … opening the door for a nationwide fraud system,” with “massive holes for illegal fraudsters to steal federal dollars from taxpayers across the country.”

The Labor Department set the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate at 11 percent for the week ending July 25, down 0.6 percentage point from the previous week. According to the department, “The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending July 18 was 32,118,678, an increase of 1,302,816 from the previous week. There were 1,707,267 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2019.”