Nearly 215,000 New Jerseyans filed for unemployment benefits last week — an all-time record — as massive job losses continued to pile up because of the coronavirus the pandemic, according to new figures released by the state Department of Labor.
The numbers released by the state Thursday morning are slightly higher than the nearly 214,000 jobless claims the U.
S. Department of Labor reported earlier. The reason for the discrepancy is that New Jersey has more up to date information on the total number of claims filed.In all, the number of New Jerseyans applying for unemployment benefits has now reached nearly 577,000 for the three-week period that began March 15.
“The number of new claims the Labor Department is receiving and the amount of benefits being paid to hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans shows the system is working, but we understand that’s of little consolation if you’re out of work and waiting for your benefits,” state Labor Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo said in a statement.
Nationwide, unemployment claims reached 6.6 million million last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The claims filed for the week ending April 4 came on top of the nearly 10 million filed in the prior two weeks.
A breakdown of the claims in New Jersey shows the hardest-hit sectors are food and accommodation services, ambulatory health care, personal services and temporary employment agencies. The state has paid a total of $283.9 million in unemployment benefits for the period between March 2 and April 3.
As policymakers struggled to come to terms with the economic fallout from the pandemic, one economist suggested last month’s expansion of unemployment benefits, including $600 added to every unemployment check through July, could blunt losses from mass layoffs.
Although the unemployment rate “could rise even higher over the coming months,” wrote Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, “the damage in terms of lost income may end up being less severe.”
As the number of jobless claims continues to rise, New Jersey officials are scrambling to find the few remaining computer programmers who are familiar with a decades-old old coding language to help process claims.
Asaro-Angelo told reporters over the weekend that IT workers are working “nonstop” to make the state’s 40-year-old systems continue to perform under such “atypical circumstances.”
Gov. Phil Murphy has also put a call out for volunteers who are trained in the antiquated COBAL program, and said it’s something the state will review in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Murphy said Wednesday that New Jersey had recorded 3,088 new positive cases of coronavirus since Tuesday, bringing the statewide total to 47,437 since the first positive case was recorded on March 4. Murphy also said 275 more state residents have died from coronavirusrelated complications since Tuesday, bringing that total to 1,504.
Rebecca Rainey contributed to this report.