WASHINGTON – The number of new claims for jobless benefits filed last week was higher than expected, primarily due to the shutdown of automobile plants following Chrysler LLC’s April 30 bankruptcy filing, the U.S. Labor Department reported today.
Americans filed 637,000 initial jobless claims from May 3 to 9, an increase of 32,000 from the previous week’s revised total of 605,000, the government reported. A spokesman for the Labor Department said “a good part” of the increase was due to auto plant closings, Bloomberg News reported.
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The total number of Americans receiving unemployment checks rose to 6.56 million, setting a new record for the 15th consecutive week, the department said.
The economy has lost 5.7 million jobs since December 2007. The U.S. unemployment rate stood at 8.9 percent in April, and the Rhode Island unemployment rate stood at 10.5 percent as of March, the most recent month for which figures are available.
The national jobless rate among workers eligible for unemployment insurance was 4.9 percent in the week ending May 2. Rhode Island had the 10th-highest state jobless rate among unemployment-eligible workers, at 5.7 percent.
The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 38 economists was that jobless claims would rise to 610,000 from last week’s originally reported figure of 601,000.
“The labor market is still very weak,” Robert Mellman, an economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., told Bloomberg before the report’s release.
But he cautioned that “we should probably not pay too much attention” to the increase because of the impact of Chrysler’s plant closures. “Most auto workers sign up fairly quickly,” he said. Troubled General Motors Corp. will begin shutting down some of its plants later this month, as well.
Separately, the Labor Department also reported that prices paid to U.S. producers, particularly for food, rose in April by 0.3 percent after a 1.2 percent drop in March. Core prices, which exclude food and fuel, rose 0.1 percent, in line with forecasts, Bloomberg said.
