The number of new jobless claims last week was 1.5 million, the Labor Department reported on Thursday.
Economists had predicted that 1.6 million people would claim unemployment benefits.
An additional 700,000 people filed for benefits through Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a special category of eligibility for self-employed workers or people seeking part-time work created by Congress in the March CARES Act relief bill.
The number of workers seeking aid remains historically high but has dropped considerably from the nearly 7 million claims that were filed the week ending on March 28.
The number of jobless workers receiving benefits fell to 20.9 million for the week ending May 30, a decrease of 339,000 from the previous week’s revised level.
The number of initial claims is also trending lower, with over 2 million claims the week ending May 23, compared to 1.9 million for the week ending May 30 and 1.5 million for the week ending June 6.
Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com, said the trend is encouraging, but full recovery is a long way down the road.
“New claims have declined for 10 straight weeks along with a drop in continuing claims,” he said.
“New claims have topped 1 million for 12 straight weeks,” he said. “That’s in contrast to fewer than 300,000 new claims in mid-March before the crisis took hold.”
Initial claims for the week ending March 14 were 282,000. That number skyrocketed to over 3.3 million the following week.
Losing millions of jobs a week for weeks at a time was unheard of before the coronavirus pandemic.
The job losses from Thursday’s report come on the heels of the Labor Department announcing last week that the economy gained 2.5 million jobs in May, lowering the unemployment rate to 13.3%, from 14.7% in April.
Friday’s reported payroll gains, the largest on record, represented a stunning development and hinted that the economy might be recovering from the damage caused by the pandemic.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Wednesday deemed the job gains as “nice to see” and noted that almost no one saw them coming as the expectation in job gains were to begin as soon as June, not May.
He was also hesitant to say that the jobs crisis is over based upon last week’s jobs report and said that millions of workers will probably not return to the labor market once the economic crisis has passed.
The pandemic upended the strong jobs market in a matter of months. The unemployment rate in February was 3.5%, but then stay-at-home orders were issued to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and businesses deemed nonessential were closed, putting millions of people out of work.
