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Katrina swells ranks of unemployed
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-09-15 22:20
The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless
aid shot up by 71,000 last week, the biggest jump in nearly 10 years, as workers
displaced by Hurricane Katrina sought to join the benefit rolls, the government
said on Thursday.
Katrina evacuees from New Orleans wait in line
for food stamps at Camp Edwards in Bourne, Massachusetts September 12,
2005. The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless aid shot up by
71,000 last week, the biggest jump in nearly 10 years, as workers
displaced by Katrina sought to join the benefit rolls.
[Reuters] |
The rise in first-time claims for state unemployment aid, among the first
economic data to capture the human toll of the devastating storm, brought
initial filings in the week ended September 10 to 398,000, the highest level in
two years.
The Labor Department estimated that 68,000 of those claims were related to
Katrina, which slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast on August 29. However, it
cautioned that it was unable to process the huge surge in claims that were filed
as state workers waded into evacuee shelters to log applications.
"Due to the unprecedented volume of claims filed in the affected areas and
due to the unconventional methods used in filing, the numbers that are reported
do not truly reflect the number of claims filed," a department analyst said.
He said the department could not offer a "ballpark" figure on how many claims
had been collected but not yet captured in the department's report. "We are
expecting an upward revision in the following week," he said.
Forecasts on Wall Street had centered on a guess that initial claims would
rise to 350,000 from the 319,000 initially reported for the prior week. However,
Hurricane Katrina led to a wide dispersion of projections -- from a low of
320,000 to a high of 800,000.
The increase in initial claims was the largest for any week since January
1996, when blizzards blanketed the East Coast.
The big jump pushed a four-week moving average of claims up by 19,750 to
340,750, the highest level in nearly a year. Economists usually track the
less-volatile moving average to get a better sense of underlying job-market
trends.
The number of workers who continued to file for benefits after an initial
week of aid rose by 20,000 to 2.59 million. But that number is certain to swell
as workers displaced by Katrina join the rolls.
States provide unemployment benefits for up to 26 weeks, but lawmakers are
already mulling a federal program to extend aid for an additional 13 weeks in
the wake of the storm. Congress passed similar extensions amid the jobless
recovery from the 2001 recession.
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