An additional 218,912 New Yorkers filed for unemployment the week of April 25 according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The number was up from 205,184 the previous week.
Nationwide, a total of 3,839,000 people filed for unemployment last week, a decrease of 603,000 from the previous week’s revised level. The previous week’s level was revised up by 15,000 from 4,427,000 to 4,442,000.
The New York State Department of Labor said this week it has distributed over $3.1 billion in unemployment benefits to New Yorkers since the coronavirus pandemic started in early March.
NY has been busy paying out benefits to the unemployed, despite early problems with the system being overwhelmed. NY has added more customer service claims reps to handle calls and streamlined its website.
NY Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon said: “Here in New York, we are working faster and more aggressively than other states our size to connect New Yorkers with their benefits – and in just six weeks, we have delivered over $3 billion dollars in benefits to more than 1 million individuals. For context, that is over 5 and-a-half times the amount paid by Florida, which has roughly the same population as New York State. And a new analysis by Roll Call found that, of the 10 states with the most new unemployment claims during this crisis, New York is doing the best at processing new claims.”
Since March 9, New York State has processed 1.4 million initial applications for unemployment benefits, including 207,172 during the week ending April 18 and 399,015 the week before.
Between March 9 and April 22, New York State has distributed $3.1 billion to support New Yorkers who lost their jobs. This level of relief far outstrips what has been provided by other large states during this crisis. The total includes traditional unemployment insurance and new federal programs like Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which provides benefits for those not covered by traditional unemployment insurance; Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC), which provides an additional $600 per week for all benefit recipients; and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which provides 13 additional weeks of benefits, for a total of 39 weeks of unemployment benefits.
Facing an unprecedented surge in unemployment claims, the Department of Labor has taken decisive action to update its system, streamline operations, and improve its capacity to serve New Yorkers. These efforts include:
- Launching a new, streamlined website backed by Google Cloud’s infrastructure, which can automatically scale to meet demand;
- Undertaking a major call back initiative to proactively call New Yorkers with partially completed applications and obtain the information needed to process their claims. To date, the DOL has made over 625,000 proactive calls;
- Increasing the number of Department of Labor representatives handling calls and processing applications from 400 people working five days a week to up to 3,100 individuals working seven days a week;
- Rolling out a streamlined online application, which allows New Yorkers to seamlessly apply for either traditional unemployment insurance or the new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance in one system; and
- Being among the first states to release the additional $600 weekly payments to unemployed individuals – even before the federal government made funding available.
The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending April 11 were in Michigan (21.8), Vermont (21.2), Connecticut (18.5), Pennsylvania (18.5), Nevada (16.8), Rhode Island (16.7), Washington (16.0), Alaska (15.6), New York (14.4), and West Virginia (14.4).
The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending April 18 were in Florida (+326,251), Connecticut (+68,758), West Virginia (+31,811), Louisiana (+12,270), and Texas (+6,504), while the largest decreases were in New York (-189,517), California (-127,112), Michigan (-85,500), Georgia (-72,578), and Washington (-60,980).
