Additional 873,000 Americans filed for unemployment claims last week

More Americans continue to file for unemployment benefits amid the economy’s slow recovery. Last week, an additional 837,000 Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits on a seasonally adjusted basis.

The reported numbers for last week excluded numbers from California, which halted its processing of initial claims for two weeks. California is currently working on a large backlog of benefits claims and taking steps to prevent fraud. The state, rather, presented a rough estimate of first-time unemployment benefit filings of 650,120. This brought the total number of unemployment claims for last week to roughly 1.4 million, for first-time claims.

Continued unemployment claims for last week and the prior week remained at 11.8 million, on a seasonally adjusted basis.

In addition, the number of people who receive financial support under the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program which was created to help workers who had exhausted their regular state benefits, increased as well.

This comes as more companies lay off and furlough their workers. American United and United Airlines have already begun the process of laying off 32,000 of their employees due to inadequate finances. The $25 billion payroll support which was granted to airlines in April, reached its expiry date on Thursday. Until Congress approves another coronavirus stimulus package many companies may continue to lay off their employees to cut costs.

Disney has also joined in the layoffs wagon after it announced earlier this week that it would cut off 28,000 jobs in the coming days.

According to economists’ expectations, 850,000 jobs were reinstated, which slashed the unemployment rate from 8.4% in August to 8.2% in September. An economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, AnnElizabeth Konkel said not all the job figures were as dire as they seemed. She said the trend in job postings on Indeed was 17.5% lower from what it was a year ago; this was as of September 25. That means that there was only a small gap with the 2019 trend.

On Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released data that showed that personal incomes dropped by 2.7% in August, after the additional government $600 jobless benefits expired at the end of July.

As the economy continues to recover slowly, congress is still unable to make final conclusions on the next stimulus package. Some states have already run out of their allotted funds and many companies have reached their payroll support expiry dates.

Economic experts are certain that the current economic state is bad news for the nation, as the U.S. economy heavily relies on consumer spending.