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Employment in the USA going through his worst fall 4:25
(CNN Business) - There is no light at the end of the tunnel on the jobs that have been lost in connection with the coronavirus pandemic.
The crisis has devastated the U.S. job market: 1 in 5 workers has applied for unemployment assistance for the first time since mid-March, when the closure measures took effect across the country.
- READ: 3.2 million more Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week
At least 3.2 million more Americans filed initial jobless claims last week, after seasonal adjustments were considered, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
Without those adjustments - which economists use to report seasonal fluctuations in hiring - the net number was 2.8 million.
That brings the total initial filings filed, seasonally adjusted, to 33.5 million since mid-March. These initial requests are considered a representation of the layoffs or licenses, which reached approximately 21% of the March workforce.
These are overwhelmingly high numbers, as weekly applications for unemployment economic assistance hovered around 200,000 in recent years before this crisis.
However, last week was the fifth in a row that the number of initial requests decreased. Applications peaked at 6.9 million in the last week of March.
Economists emphasize that the downward trend is a good sign that things are not getting worse. Still, the millions of new requests that are recorded each week do not help the brutal overall picture of the job market during this pandemic.
The jobs that will not return after the covid-19 pandemic 2:50Now, continued applications for unemployment financial assistance, representing those who applied for a second week (or longer) of benefits, have risen to 22.6 million.
Not all requests result in people actually receiving aid. This is due in part to errors in documentation as not all people seeking the grant are eligible to receive it.
Continued requests also suggest that few people are being called back to work. Those numbers could begin to decrease in the coming weeks as restrictions begin to loosen in some states, said Capital Economics chief economist Paul Ashworth.
But the pace of the recovery will depend on how willing consumers are to venture out of their homes and spend money when there is no coronavirus vaccine yet, said Mark Hamrick, an economic analyst at Bankrate.
- LOOK: Unemployment in the United States has not been as severe since the 1930s
In response to the crisis, the government expanded the definition of who can receive unemployment financial aid, with the aim of including contractors, freelancers and concert market staff. The Department of Labor reported that, since last week, all 50 states have paid for that extra help. However, the agency has not yet released detailed numbers of how many applications have come through that program in each state.
What the department did specify is that a total of 583,699 initial requests for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance were registered in 23 states that reported data for the week ending May 2.
Overall, the past seven weeks of record numbers in grant applications - which have dwarfed historic Labor Department data - show a clear picture: the US job market is in danger and people are suffering.
"The data points to an unprecedented cascading crisis, which hit front-line services like restaurants and retail businesses first, but has now reached every corner of our economy: from production to even the healthcare industry." , analyzed Andrew Stettner, senior member of The Century Foundation.
More than 30 million ask for unemployment benefits 2:46In Kentucky, where many production plants are located, initial claims for unemployment financial assistance in the past seven weeks amount to nearly 33% of the state's workforce in March. Hawaii and Georgia have also had a number of petitions totaling more than 30% of their respective workforces.
This Wednesday, the ADP National Employment Report showed that in April more than 20 million jobs were lost in the United States. The official report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be released this Friday, and the economists surveyed by Refinitiv expect to see some 22 million lost jobs and an unemployment rate of 16%, the worst on record.
Assistance Help Unemployment in the United States