New unemployment claims filed as of Saturday, April 11 show over 12 percent of Massachusetts residents are now unemployed.
New unemployment claims were down 36,607 from the previous week, but still totaled 103,040, according to data released by the Federal Department of Labor this morning. Added to the 358,758 who are receiving unemployment assistance right now, that brings the state’s unemployment rate to 12.04 percent.
The new unemployment figures show the state’s jobless rate is not accelerating after claims filed in the last two weeks of March repeatedly broke weekly records set in the Great Recession. However, many forecasters worry the state could be on its way to 18 percent unemployment as the coronavirus-fueled economic crisis begins to claim more companies as victims. So far, construction, retail and hotels have been hit hardest but 1,300 layoffs at software firm Toast suggest local white-collar and manufacturing jobs may not be immune to the downturn.
Massachusetts has now far exceeded its Great Recession record unemployment rate of 8.8 percent, set in December 2009 and January 2010.
Nationally, the wave of layoffs that has engulfed the U.S. economy since the coronavirus struck forced 5.2 million more people to seek unemployment benefits last week.
Roughly 22 million have sought jobless benefits in the past month – easily the worst stretch of U.S. job losses on record. All told, roughly nearly 12 million people are now receiving unemployment checks, roughly matching the peak reached in January 2010, shortly after the Great Recession officially ended.
Layoffs are spreading beyond service industries like hotels, bars and restaurants, which absorbed the brunt of the initial job cuts, into white collar professional occupations, including software programmers, construction workers and sales people.
“This crisis combines the scale of a national economic downturn with the pace of a natural disaster,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor. “And that’s really unprecedented in American economic history.”
Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimates that the nation’s output will shrink 10.5 percent. before it starts to rebound. That would be more than double the contraction that occurred during the 2008-2009 recession, which was the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
What’s uncertain is how quickly the country will rebound. Experts say that the medium-term fate of Massachusetts’ economy should become clearer in around a month.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
