The United States has undergone an unexpected rise in unemployment in the past week, with the coronavirus pandemic still causing widespread disruptions to the economy.
This finding came on Thursday morning, when the Department of Labor (DOL) released its weekly claims report regarding joblessness. The report indicated that approximately 898,000 Americans had filed for unemployment insurance last week.
The exact details enclosed in the report are as follows:
- Initial jobless claims for the week ending October 10—898,000 vs. the 825,000 that were expected (up to 53,000 claims from the previous week)
- Continuing jobless claims for the week ending October 10 – 10.018 million vs. the 10.550 million that were expected (down 0.633 million claims from the previous week)
While this is the seventh consecutive week that claims have managed to remain below the one million mark, this steady volume of layoffs continues to have a lasting impact on the US economy.
With this influx of claims, several U.S. states are facing the challenge of continuing to process an excessive volume of claims in order to avoid a backlog. California, the United States’ most populous state, announced that it would be temporarily halting its processing claims. This will be done in order to “reduce its claims processing backlog and implement fraud prevention technology.”
