43,777 Hoosiers applied for jobless aid

A total of 43,777 Indiana workers filed initial unemployment claims last week as the business shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 crisis continued to deepen in what appears to be the worst U.S. economic downturn in decades.

Roughly 612,000 claims for jobless aid have been filed in Indiana over the past seven weeks since the coronavirus began forcing millions of companies to close their doors and drastically reduce their workforces, according to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development.

Though the figures are still historically high, jobless claims are steadily declining after sharp spikes in late March and early April, The Associated Press reported. Initial claims for unemployment aid in Indiana have now fallen for five straight weeks, from a peak of 139,174 during the week ending March 28.

In Bartholomew County, 1,531 initial jobless claims were filed the week ending April 18, down from 1,845 filed the week before. A total of 7,216 initial jobless claims were filed in the county between March 15 and April 18.

“This continues to show a downward trend since our peak claims week back in March,” said Fred Payne, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, during a Thursday press conference.

Nearly 3.2 million workers across the United States applied for unemployment benefits last week, increasing the total to 33.5 million people who have filed for jobless aid in the past seven weeks, according to The Associated Press. That is the equivalent of one in five Americans who had been employed back in February, when the unemployment rate had reached a 50-year low of just 3.5%.

Those figures, however, are a rough proxy for the job losses and for the unemployment rate that will be released Friday, which will likely to be the worst since modern record-keeping began after World War II, the Associated Press reported.

The unemployment rate is forecast to reach 16%, the highest rate since the Great Depression, and economists estimate that 21 million jobs were lost last month. If so, it would mean that nearly all the job growth in the 11 years since the Great Recession ended has vanished in a single month.

Even those stunning figures may not fully capture the magnitude of the damage the coronavirus has inflicted on the job market, according to wire reports.

Many people who are still employed have had their hours reduced. Others have suffered pay cuts. Some who lost jobs in April and didn’t look for a new one in light of their bleak prospects won’t even be counted as unemployed and the official figures for jobless claims may also be under-counting layoffs.

Surveys by academic economists and think tanks suggest that as many as 12 million workers who were laid off by mid-April did not file for unemployment benefits by then, either because they couldn’t navigate their state’s overwhelmed systems or they felt too discouraged to try, according to The Associated Press.

The Indiana Department of Workforce Development had more than 1.3 million phone interactions in April and around 153,000 interactions during the first week of May, Payne said.

The state has dispersed around $986 million in federal and state jobless aid benefits since the beginning of April, Payne added.

“Our wait time is still high, and our call back efficiency is improving,” he said. “So we’re improving on both of those two fronts, but we’re still nowhere close to where we want to be, and we’re still nowhere close to claimants actually feeling that positive trend.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Visit www.in.gov/dwd/2362.htm for more information on how to file an unemployment claim in Indiana.

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