Unemployment claims rose in California last week and remained well above pre-coronavirus levels, marking an unsettling start for the statewide economy to kick off 2022, a report released Thursday shows.
California workers filed 55,300 initial claims for unemployment during the week ending on Jan. 29, up 1,100 from the 54,200 claims that workers filed in the week that ended on Jan. 22, the U.S. Labor Department reported.
Jobless claims statewide have remained well above 50,000 for the last five weeks, an indication that the California job market is still struggling to convalesce from economic ailments that the coronavirus unleashed.
Nationwide, workers filed 238,000 initial claims for unemployment benefits last week, which marked a decrease of 23,000 from the filings the week before. These nationwide numbers were adjusted for seasonal volatility.
In California, the current level of jobless claims remains far above what was typical before state and local government agencies ordered wide-ranging business shutdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
During January 2020 and February 2020, the final two months before the start of the lockdowns in March 2020 to combat the deadly bug, unemployment claims averaged 44,800 a week in California.
California’s most recent jobless claims, which totaled 55,300 last week, are 23% higher than the average for early 2020.
Even worse, California continues to produce an outsized share of all the jobless claims that are being filed in the United States.
Using comparable numbers that were not adjusted for seasonal volatility, California accounted for more than one out of every five — 21.5% — of all of the unemployment claims that were filed in the United States.
This represents a larger-than-normal share because California has only roughly 11% of the nation’s labor pool.
