WASHINGTON (Fox News): Nearly 3.17 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday, deepening the economic pain inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic on the U.S. workforce.
The new report, which covers the week ending May 2, pushes the seven-week total of losses since states adopted strict stay-at-home measures to more than 33 million, erasing the entirety of all jobs created during the past decade. Unemployment at this scale hasn’t been recorded since the Great Depression.
Economists surveyed by Refinitiv had forecast 3 million.
The latest evidence of the virus outbreak’s toll on the labor market precedes the Labor Department’s April jobs report, which is expected to reveal that unemployment skyrocketed to 16 percent last month, a record. The figures go back to 1948.
Congress has passed four massive economic-relief packages totaling nearly $3 trillion, an unprecedented amount, to blunt the virus outbreak’s toll on American workers and businesses.
Still, economists have warned that the labor market may be slow to return to pre-crisis levels.
“We’re going to see economic data for the second quarter that’s worse than any data we’ve seen for the economy,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said during a news conference last week. He said that rolling back some social distancing measures could boost economic growth, but added: “It’s unlikely that it would bring us quickly all the way back to pre-crisis levels.”
