For the week ending January 14, 2017, jobless claims declined 15K to 234K, the lowest level since the 1970s. This is the last Unemployment Insurance data under President Barack Obama. The first reading under his Presidency, on January 24, 2009, was a whopping 586K.
Unemployment insurance (UI)
programs are administered at the state level and provide assistance to jobless
people who are looking for work. Statistics on the insured unemployed in the
United States are collected as a by-product of state UI programs. Workers who
lose their jobs may file applications to determine if they are eligible for UI
assistance. These applications are referred to as "initial claims."
Claimants who meet the eligibility requirements must file "continuing
claims" for each week that they seek benefits.
Data on initial and continuing
UI claims are maintained by the Employment and Training Administration, an
agency of the U.S. Department of Labor, and are available on the Internet at http://workforcesecurity.doleta.gov/unemploy/claims.asp.
While the UI claims data
provide useful information, they are not used to measure total unemployment
because they exclude several important groups. To begin with, not all workers
are covered by UI programs. For example, self-employed workers, unpaid family
workers, workers in certain not-for-profit organizations, and several other
small (primarily seasonal) worker categories are not covered.
In addition, the insured
unemployed exclude the following:
1.Unemployed workers who have
exhausted their benefits.
2.Unemployed workers who have
not yet earned benefit rights (such as new entrants or reentrants to the labor
force).
3.Disqualified workers whose
unemployment is considered to have resulted from their own actions rather than
from economic conditions; for example, a worker fired for misconduct on the
job.
4.Otherwise eligible unemployed
persons who do not file for benefits.
Because of these and other
limitations, statistics on insured unemployment cannot be used as a measure of
total unemployment in the United States. Indeed, over the past decade, only
about one-third of the total unemployed, on average, received regular UI benefits.
UI claims data are widely used
as an indicator of labor market conditions. Data users must be cautious,
however, about trying to compare or reconcile the UI claims data with the
official unemployment figures gathered through the CPS. Even if one sets aside
the major definitional limitations outlined above, there are comparability
issues related to the distinct reference periods, methodologies, and reporting
practices of the two data sources. More importantly, though, the weekly UI
claims data reflect only people who became unemployed and do not take into
account the number of unemployed people who found jobs or stopped looking for
work. The official unemployment figures from the CPS, on the other hand,
represent the net result of overall movement into and out of unemployment in a
given month. Changes in CPS estimates of total unemployment for any given month
will tend to be far smaller than the sum total of weekly UI initial claimants
over a month-long span.
