Unemployment claims in California fell for the third straight week and declined to their lowest point in months, the government reported Thursday, offering hope that the state’s economy has begun to shed some of the ailments unleashed by coronavirus-linked business shutdowns.
California workers filed 213,500 first-time claims for unemployment during the week that ended on Aug. 8, which was down about 8,500 from the 222,000 initial claims filed in the week that ended on Aug. 1, the U.S. Labor Department reported.
The initial claims for unemployment filed during the Aug. 8 week were the fewest claims filed since the week that ended May 23, when 203,300 claims were filed, according to this news organization’s analysis of reports filed by the Labor Department and the state’s Employment Development Department.
Still, the business shutdowns ordered by state and local government agencies in a quest to battle the spread of the deadly bug have clearly taken a toll on the California economy.
Since the shutdowns began about five months ago, a jaw-dropping 7.51 million California workers have filed first-time claims for unemployment.
Nationwide, 963,000 workers filed initial claims for unemployment during the week ending on Aug. 8, which was down 228,000 from the 1.19 million jobless claims that were filed in the week ending on Aug. 1.
This marked the first time since the week of March 14 — the approximate starting point for government-imposed business shutdowns — that the number of weekly initial jobless claims filed in the United States fell below 1 million.
So far, the United States job market appears to have shed the side-effects of the coronavirus at a faster pace than is the case with California’s economy, an analysis of the pace of jobless claims suggests.
The highest level of jobless claims filings occurred during the week that ended on March 28, when workers in the United States filed 6.87 million initial claims and California workers filed 1.06 million claims.
The latest U.S. jobless claims filings are 86 percent below the nationwide peak, while the California filings are 79.8 percent below the statewide peak.
