New unemployment claims were up slightly - and surprisingly - this week, apparently signaling bad news for the economy. But there was an unusual mitigating factor: the recently settled strike against Verizon.
The Labor Department reported that 417,000 Americans filed first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, which was up about 9,000 from the previous week. About 21,000 union members, though, were among those filing unemployment claims. The strike against Verizon ended on Tuesday, so those people will be back at work instead of collecting unemployment insurance. The upshot is that the "real" number of new unemployment filers last week should have been something like 396,000.
Wait - how can striking workers expect to call themselves unemployed? It turns out that in the state of New York, the law allows some striking workers to collect unemployment benefits. Among the Verizon workers who went on strike, about 16,000 of them lived in New York, and were thus eligible to file under the law. The remaining 5,000 filers may have just been confused.
No comments:
Post a Comment