Unemployment report worse than expected

About 626,000 Americans filed for jobless benefits last week, the highest weekly level since the fall of 1982, the government reported Thursday.

With the weekly filing coming in worse than expected, roughly 4.8 million Americans are receiving unemployment benefits, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration.

“In my view, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better,” said Vernon M. Briggs Jr., professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University. “Every indicator in the labor market is deteriorating and the big concern is how fast they are deteriorating.”

Forces are driving the market in ways not seen before, he said. “This is the first time we’ve had a recession in the era of globalized economics. Things are far different now.”

Georgia’s job market has weakened even faster than the national average.

In the past 12 months, the state’s unemployment rate has jumped from 4.5 percent to 8.1 percent. Jobless claims, too, have paralleled the national trend —- only faster.

Nearly 129,000 Georgians filed first-time claims in December, a 174 percent leap from the number filed during the month a year earlier.

Atlanta’s first-time claims were up 139 percent during the year.

Nationally, new claims have not come close to the 1982 record of 695,000 in one week, but they have been steadily rising. Claims nationally have averaged 582,000 for the past four weeks, up about 60 percent from a year ago.

The number of claims is generally seen as a guide to the overall labor market in two ways.

First, the spike in the number of new filings shows companies laying off workers as they scramble to cut costs. Second, the rise in the number of people with continuing claims is a sign that those who are laid off are having trouble landing another job.

On average, job seekers outnumber openings four to one, the Labor Department said.

The current recession is 13 months old, three shy of the longest downturn since World War II, and optimists say the economy could bottom out by mid-year.

However, if the jobless claims do not crest soon, it will be hard to hold that rosier view, wrote economist Andrew Gledhill in an online post for Economy.com. “Should continuing claims persistently rise at their current rate over the next several weeks, it would be a warning signal that the recession may be deeper than already forecast.”

Thursday’s jobless claims came on the cusp of today’s much-anticipated report on January jobs.

The December report showed the economy shedding an estimated 524,000 jobs while the official unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent. Earlier this week, two surveys hinted that today’s report will reveal another month of large job losses and a higher jobless rate.

In its monthly survey, Automatic Data Processing estimated that more than 500,000 jobs were lost in January. And the outplacement firm of Challenger, Gray and Christmas recorded a 45 percent jump in the number of announced job cuts.

Still, as bad as the numbers have been, they are not as painful as during some recessions of the past when the work force was smaller.

In the past four weeks, more than 2.3 million people have filed new claims for jobless benefits. That represents about 1.5 percent of all workers with jobs.

Those numbers are worse than in 2001. But during one four-week period during the 1991 recession, just under 2 million people filed new claims, representing 1.6 percent of all people with jobs.

And in one four-week period during the 1982 recession, nearly 2.7 million people filed first-time claims —- 2.4 percent of all people with jobs.

Proportionally, that amounts to 50 percent deeper pain than the layoffs do now.

Similarly, the official jobless rate now is higher than in 2001 but lower than in 1991. The highest jobless rate since World War II came as the economy was emerging from recession: 10.8 percent.

Joblessness has not hit double-digits since then.