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Another 38,000 Massachusetts residents filed first-time jobless claims for the week ending May 16, bringing the total number of first-time jobless claims filed since March 15 up to just shy of 30 percent of the state’s March workforce.
According to data released by the federal Department of Labor Thursday morning, 38,328 had filed first-time claims in Massachusetts last week. Added to state data released last Thursday covering March 15 through May 8, which showed 821,506 claims filed for unemployment in the traditional unemployment system and a further 255,000 in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance system for the self-employed and independent contractors, 1.11 million first-time unemployment claims have been filed since the start of the coronavirus crisis. This equates to 29.8 percent of Massachusetts’ 3.74 million-person March workforce.
As of May 15, 584,313 people were approved for and continuing to claim unemployment benefits in the traditional unemployment system. The discrepancy may be partly explained by the fact that some first-time filers may have been experiencing temporary furloughs, while others may not have earned enough in their previous jobs to qualify for unemployment. State data for workers who are continuing to claim unemployment through May 8 shows the hardest-hit sectors to be hospitality, at 17.61 percent of claims, followed by retail at 13.78 percent, healthcare and social assistance at 13.12 percent and construction at 9.4 percent. Workers from professional and technical sectors – largely office workers – have made up only 5.23 percent of unemployment claims despite making up 16.19 percent of the state’s workforce.
As in previous weeks, the number of first-time jobless claims filed in Massachusetts last week fell week-over-week, this time by 6,587 compared to the 44,915 filed in the week ending May 8.
Another 2.4 million people across the country filed first-time unemployment benefits for the week ending May 15, 7,7 percent down from the prior week but bringing the national tally up to 38.6 million. An additional 2.2 million have sought benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.
The continuing stream of heavy job cuts reflects an economy that is sinking into the worst recession since the Great Depression. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated this week that the economy is shrinking at a 38 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter. That would be by far the worst quarterly contraction on record.
Nearly half of Americans say that either their incomes have declined or they live with another adult who has lost pay through a job loss or reduced hours, the Census Bureau said in survey data released Wednesday More than one-fifth of Americans said they had little or no confidence in their ability to pay the next month’s rent or mortgage on time, the survey found.
During April, U.S. employers shed 20 million jobs, eliminating a decade’s worth of job growth in a single month. The unemployment rate reached 14.7 percent, the highest since the Depression. Millions of other people who were out of work weren’t counted as unemployed because they didn’t look for a new job.
Since then, 10 million more laid-off workers have applied for jobless benefits. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in an interview Sunday that the unemployment rate could peak in May or June at 20 percent to 25 percent.
