Between May 30 and June 5, 376,000 people applied for benefits, or 9,000 less than the previous week. Analysts were expecting 365,000 new registrations.
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Weekly jobless claims continued to decline in early June, and hit a new low since the start of the pandemic, according to data released Thursday by the Labor Department.
Between May 30 and June 5, 376,000 people applied for unemployment benefits, or 9,000 less than the previous week.
However, this is a little worse than expected by analysts who were counting on 365,000 new registrations.
Unemployment claims had dropped below the 400,000 mark the previous week, for the first time since the American economy came to a sudden halt in March 2020.
However, this is still close to double the usual levels seen before the crisis.
The total number of unemployment benefit recipients was 15.3 million people in mid-May (-95,000), according to the most recent data also released on Thursday.
But most of the republican states will reduce or eliminate in the coming weeks the additional aid granted to the unemployed since the start of the crisis, without waiting for their expiry in early September.
So back to the usual regime, where the duration of unemployment varies from state to state and does not exceed 6 months, a period that has expired for people who lost their jobs with the crisis. The self-employed will also no longer be able to claim unemployment, and the additional amount of $ 300 per week will be eliminated.
In total, more than 2 million will no longer receive unemployment benefit in the coming weeks, according to calculations by Nancy Vanden Houten, analyst for Oxford Economics.
According to the Republicans, in fact, this unusually generous aid encourages the unemployed to stay at home rather than looking for a job, while many employers are struggling to recruit, especially in the least qualified positions, and therefore the least well paid.
The US economy created 559,000 jobs in May, but still 7.6 million are short compared to February 2020.
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