Unemployment News

With another strong topline unemployment report released Friday, President Joe Biden already is trying to hide behind the fig leaf of low nominal unemployment, but his party can’t hide the deep economic malaise overshadowing most Americans. Sadly, Democrats want to make things worse with a $740 billion tax-and-spend blowout that would kill jobs and do nothing to fight crippling…

If common sense and reports from thousands of employers weren’t enough, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper found conclusively that paying people not to work during the COVID-19 pandemic was why many of them remained unemployed. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, except that last year, major news reports were saying…

Puerto Rico’s governor, Pedro Pierluisi, signed a bill on Sept. 21 to increase the island’s minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $8.50 in 2022, to $9.50 in 2023, and potentially to $10.50 in 2024. That’s like mandating a $16-an-hour minimum wage on the U.S. mainland next year, rising to $20 an hour in 2024….

Historically, about 40% of unemployed workers have received unemployment insurance benefits. But since Congress passed massive unemployment insurance expansions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, that figure has more than quadrupled, to unemployment benefits equaling 176% of the number of unemployed workers. Between April 2020 and May of this year, state and federal unemployment insurance…

Now 15 months after Congress first responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s evident that unprecedented federal unemployment insurance bonus benefits are hurting the recovery, making it harder for businesses to find the workers they need to recover, and harder for consumers to find the products and services they want at prices they can afford. Moreover,…

The $1.9 trillion, partisan COVID-19 relief package was supposed to boost the economy, but it may have stifled it instead. With widespread reopenings, 46% of Americans having received at least one COVID-19 vaccine, and another round of “stimulus” checks boosting Americans’ bank accounts, expectations were high for job gains to exceed 1 million in April….

The latest employment report shows gradual but welcome improvements, with 379,000 jobs added to the economy and the unemployment rate edging down to 6.2%.   The easing of lockdown restrictions in many areas of the country, along with more children having the option to attend school in person, has helped ease the employment struggles of…

An additional 661,000 Americans found jobs in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report, as the unemployment rate dipped to 7.9% from 8.4% in August and a high of 14.7% in April after the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Although 14.1 million more were employed in September than April, the 12.6 million not working…

The unemployment rate fell by 1.8 percentage points to 8.4% as the economy added 1.4 million jobs in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. It was the fourth straight month that the economy added jobs and the unemployment rate fell despite the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, again upsetting experts’ predictions as the economy continued…

President Donald Trump took action five days ago to provide some coronavirus relief for Americans, saying he wasn’t going to wait for Congress. He signed one executive order and three executive memoranda addressing some of the issues. Policy experts will debate the merits of the actions, but one primary question is whether the president had…

The unemployment figures for May have surprised economists, who were expecting a significant increase in the unemployment rate and 7.5 million job losses. Instead, the unemployment rate declined from 14.7% to 13.3%, and 2.5 million new jobs were added. This is particularly important, as policymakers are now considering making changes to or extending unemployment benefits….

With more than 1 in 5 Americans filing for unemployment benefits over the past eight weeks, policymakers’ top priority is clear: restoring conditions that allow workers to resume their previous jobs or find new ones. Federal assistance can help bridge a temporary gap in employment and incomes, but the only long-term solution is to let…

Another 2.4 million workers filed for unemployment claims last week, bringing the 10-week total to nearly 39 million. If all of these represent separate claims, that means that almost 1 in 4 workers has filed for unemployment since the coronavirus shutdowns began. That’s bad news because unemployment is undesirable at best, and devastating at worst….

The U.S. economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April as the devastation from COVID-19 hit new highs Friday in the monthly jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. The report also shows that the nation’s unemployment rate soared to highs not seen since the World War II era, climbing from 4.4% to…