US Economy in question as 1 million people apply for unemployment insurance

The Labor Department said Thursday that initial jobless claims for the week ended Aug. 15 came in at 1.106 million

With job losses continuing to plague the labour market five months into coronavirus pandemic, the number of people applying for the first time for unemployment insurance ticked up last week to 1.1 million, reported The Washington Post.

As per the report, this was higher than 970,000 the week before.

Initial claims and new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program available to gig and self-employed workers, both went up, reported The Post with about 543,000 new claims were filed for PUA for the week that ended on August 15, up from 488,000 the week before.

AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the job site Indeed was quoted as saying that the fact that the claims are so high this far into the crisis is concerning.

"Yet the depths of the damage remain to be seen. I would definitely call it a canary raising alarms in the economic coal mine," said Konkel.

Konkel said the longer we go into this crisis, the longer people that have been temporarily laid off may not get called back.

The Washington Post reported that the data shows the number of job postings slowly recovering in recent weeks, compared with postings from the year prior.

"However, last week, postings took a turn for the worse. They had been running about 18 per cent below normal and fell to 20.3 per cent below normal last week," the report said.

Wieland Copper Products, in North Carolina, a Mohegan Sun casino in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Amsterdam Printing and Litho, a printing company in Upstate, N.Y., and Ohio sales are the companies which have announced layoffs in recent days.