Another 745,000 Americans filed for unemployment insurance for the first time on a seasonally adjusted basis last week, the Labor Department said on Thursday. It was a slightly lower number of complaints than economists expected, but it has increased over the previous week.
In addition, 436,696 workers have signed up to receive pandemic unemployment benefits, which are available to people as self-employed or temporary workers.
Together, claims for unemployment benefits for the first time reached 1.2 million without seasonal adjustments last week.
Continued benefit claims, which count claims filed for at least two consecutive weeks, reached 4.3 million in the week ending February 20, down from the previous week.
To be sure, the job crisis has improved a lot compared to almost a year ago, when weekly benefit claims for the first time soared to 6.9 million and millions of jobs disappeared. Many people have managed to return to work since then, but the job market remains in a hole in the middle.
Other labor market data was equally worrying this week. The ADP jobs report showed that fewer than expected jobs were added in February: 117,000 versus the predicted 177,000. Even if the private sector report and official government figures, which are delivered on Friday at 8:30 am (Eastern Time), are not correlated, it is not a big sign.
Economists predict that 182,000 jobs were created in February, up from 49,000 added earlier this year. If this is true, America would still have reduced 9.7 million jobs since February 2020, when the unemployment rate was close to a 50-year low of 3.5%.
But expectations are very different, ranging from 100,000 jobs lost to 500,000 jobs won, according to Refinitiv.
“We hope that the US job recovery will show some encouraging progress in February,” said Lydia Boussour, chief economist at Oxford Economics.
Improvements in economic and health conditions, along with the launch of coronavirus vaccines and the reopening of the Salary Protection Program for companies, will help create jobs, she said. Meanwhile, the winter storms that plagued much of the country in February are expected to have a small impact on the employment situation, according to Boussour.
The unemployment rate, which does not include people who have had to leave the labor market entirely, is expected to stand at 6.3%. Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the real unemployment rate was probably close to 10%.
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