WASHINGTON – The number of workers filing first-time claims for jobless benefits fell last week, but the total number on the unemployment rolls climbed to a 26-year high, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration.
Initial claims for jobless benefits dipped by 94,000 filings to a seasonally adjusted 492,000 in the holiday-shortened week ended Dec. 27, a 16.04-percent decline from the preceding week’s 586,000 claims but a 45.13-percent increase from the 339,000 new claims registered in the same week of 2007.
Analysts had expected the administration would report 575,000 new jobless claims last week, based on the median forecast from a Bloomberg News survey of 17 economists. (Their estimates of initial claims in the week ended Dec. 27 ranged from 540,000 to 585,000.) By comparison, for all of 2007, the nation posted a weekly average of 321,000 new claims for unemployment benefits.
Meanwhile, the total number of people collecting jobless benefits nationwide rose to its highest level since 1982. In the week ended Dec. 20 – the most recent for which such estimates are available – the ranks of the insured unemployed swelled to 4.506 million from the preceding week’s revised 4.366 million and the year-ago 2.812 million, the ETA said.
And the insured unemployment rate – the share of the U.S. work force receiving unemployment benefits – rose to 3.7 percent in the week ended Dec. 20 from 3.3 percent the week before and 2.1 percent a year earlier.
“The underlying picture is terrible for the labor market,” Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc. in New York, told Bloomberg News. The unemployment figures for last week, he added, were “distorted by some sort of breakdown in the seasonal-adjustment process with the holidays.”
In the first 11 months of this year, U.S. job losses have totaled 1.9 million – and a recent Bloomberg survey of economists predicted the nation will lose another 475,000 jobs in December. (READ MORE) Those losses may continue next year, as the unemployment rate rises to 8.2 percent from last month’s 6.7 percent, based on the survey’s median forecast.
Additional information, including the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, is available from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration at www.dol.gov.
