Initial unemployment insurance claims dropped in both Clark County and statewide in the week that ended Saturday. But the 23 percent decrease in Clark County still translated to 4,842 new claims for benefits.
Statewide, the number of initial claims fell 26.8 percent compared with the prior week.
“It’s still a huge number,” said Scott Bailey, regional economist for Southwest Washington. “It’s not surprising it would taper off after a while. But there’s still a lot more claims coming.”
As usual, claims from four sectors outweigh others: health care, restaurants, retail and construction.
With Gov. Jay Inslee’s Phase One plan to reopen businesses just kicking in on Tuesday, several of those sectors won’t see much reprieve for a while. There could be some improvements in retail, with curbside delivery of purchases and auto sales allowed, and many construction jobs have resumed. But Washington’s restaurants are still closed to sit-down dining.
Still, Thursday’s numbers suggest that the wave of job losses may have crested.
“We don’t expect any more major waves of increases of claims,” Suzi LeVine, commissioner of the Washington Employment Security Department, said Thursday morning.
More than half a million Washingtonians have received unemployment insurance funding during the pandemic, but a major backlog of applicants remains as the state rushes to sort them out. LeVine said that the backlog should be resolved by mid-June.
The state has sent about $2.1 billion to the applicants, and most of the funding has come from federal stimulus money. LeVine said that she was confident the state would not run out of cash during the pandemic. More than 1.4 million initial claims have been filed since early March.
“Our trust fund is solid,” she said.
April’s official unemployment rate remains to be calculated. Bailey said that Clark County’s total initial claims, with duplicate claimants filtered out, filed in the past nine weeks amounted to 14 percent of the local labor force in February. Statewide, the ratio of claims compared with the February labor force was 19 percent.
On May 26, the state will release an estimated county unemployment rate for the month of April, which will likely show the first impacts of the pandemic.
