Between August 15 and 21, 353,000 people applied for unemployment benefit, i.e. 4,000 more than in the previous week.
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Weekly jobless claims picked up a small increase in mid-August in the United States, after four weeks of decline, but the trend remains downward despite the risks posed by the Delta variant, according to data released Thursday by the Department of Labor .
Between August 15 and 21, 353,000 people applied for unemployment benefit, i.e. 4,000 more than in the previous week, whose figures have been revised up slightly, with 349,000 registrations.
This increase is however less strong than expected by a consensus of analysts, which counted on 355,000 new requests.
The total number of beneficiaries of unemployment benefit is also on the rise, with 12 million people in early August, 182,165 more than the previous week, according to the most recent data available, also released Thursday.
Despite this weekly increase, “the general trend is downward in registrations, despite the wave of Covid (linked to the variant) Delta”, observes Ian Shepherdson, economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics.
Indeed, he points out, companies prefer to keep their employees, because they “cannot be sure that they will be able to rehire the people they are laying off now”.
Many employers are still struggling to find candidates for vacant positions, especially those with the lowest pay.
To encourage the unemployed to return to work, half of the country’s states have, for several weeks, prematurely removed the more generous unemployment benefits that had been paid since the start of the pandemic.
And from September 6, this additional aid will end across the country. The long-term unemployed, as well as the self-employed, in particular, will no longer receive anything.
But that should not lead to “immediate improvement in employment.” In the short term, other factors – notably the evolution of the Delta variant of the coronavirus and access to childcare services – will probably have a greater impact on the labor market, ”comments Nancy Vanden Houten, economist for Oxford Economics.
The Biden administration has also called on states where the unemployment rate remains high to use certain funds provided by the federal government to help the unemployed.
The job market improved significantly in July, with 943,000 jobs created. However, 5.7 million are still missing compared to February 2020, before the pandemic. The August unemployment rate will be released on September 3.
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