From January 2 to 8, 230,000 people registered as unemployed to receive an allowance, ie 23,000 more than the previous week.
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Weekly jobless claims continued to climb in the United States in early January, for the second week in a row, but remain at a very low level, the country’s employers reluctant to lay off in the face of the labor shortage.
From Jan. 2-8, 230,000 people registered as unemployed to receive benefits, up 23,000 from the previous week, according to Labor Department figures released Thursday.
Registrations are at their highest since early November, disappointing analysts, who expected to see registrations start to fall again, and had forecast 202,000 registrations.
American employers have been facing a labor shortage for months, which is pushing them to keep their employees.
The four-week average of registrations also climbed, and stood at 210,750 (+6,250 compared to the previous week).
This increase “likely reflects an increase in layoffs due to the increase in the number of Covid cases” linked to Omicron, commented Nancy Vanden Houten, economist for Oxford Economics.
“Listings may remain high in the near term, but we expect (they) will return to the 200,000 level once the Omicron wave passes,” she added.
Seasonal factors linked to the end-of-year holiday period could also be at the origin of this new rebound, underlines Ian Shepherdson, economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics.
“The rapidity of the drop in registrations in November was accentuated by favorable seasonal factors, and the backlash is showing in recent figures”, he underlines, expecting an effect for “another week or two”, before a further decline.
As a result, the total number of benefit recipients is also going up, and the country had 1.9 million recipients during the week of Dec. 19-25, according to the most recent data available, also released on Thursday.
This is 226,264 more than the previous week, but it is 10 times less than the 19 million last year at the same time.
In December, the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%, returning close to its pre-pandemic level (3.5%). But job creations have lagged behind, and inequalities are very strong.
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