In the United States, the number of new unemployment benefit claimants stood at 3.169 million during the week of April 26 to May 2, according to figures released by the Labor Department on Thursday. Analysts were slightly less pessimistic, expecting 2.9 million new registrants. In total, since the brutal shutdown of the economy in mid-March with the implementation of massive containment measures in the country to fight the coronavirus epidemic, nearly 33.5 million people have become unemployed.
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Historically high unemployment rate in April
The number of new registrants is slowly decreasing each week. The last week of March holds the historic record, with more than 6.8 million people registered. The level remains exceptionally high, however, compared to the 200,000 or 250,000 new registrants that the country had each week before the crisis. And the United States must now compensate more unemployed people than ever.
As a result, 22.6 million unemployed workers were compensated in the last week of April, which registered 26.4 million claims. These data are published a week late compared to unemployment benefit claims. This represents a unemployment rate of 15.5%, up 3.1 points from the previous week. Before the pandemic, the United States compensated approximately 1.7 million unemployed people.
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The unemployment rate for April will be released on Friday, and will no doubt reach a historically high level. It could approach 20%, almost twice the 10.1% recorded at the height of the Great Recession of 2009.
Strong decrease in productivity in the first quarter of 2020
In addition, productivity in the United States fell sharply in the first quarter of 2020, reflecting the cessation of activity that occurred suddenly in mid-March to stem the coronavirus pandemic, according to preliminary estimates also released Thursday by the department work. From January to March, it fell by 2.5%, the result of production down 6.2% and the number of hours worked down 3.8%.
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Compared to the first quarter of 2019, productivity was up 0.3%, reflecting a 0.1% increase in productivity and a 0.2% decrease in the number of hours worked. Unit labor costs rose 4.8%.