New Hampshire jobless claims edge up slightly

(The Center Square) – First-time claims for unemployment benefits in New Hampshire rose last week, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s weekly report.

There were 507 new applications for state unemployment benefits filed for the week that ended Dec. 4, the federal agency reported on Thursday. That’s 46 more claims than the previous week.

Continuing state unemployment claims – which lag behind a week – totalled 2,355 in the week ending Nov. 27, dropping by 18 over the previous week.

The state also reported 115 new claims last week for federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that expired two months ago. That’s 81 more PUA claims than the previous week, according to the report.

PUA and other federal unemployment programs created by Congress in response to the pandemic – including a $300 per week enhanced benefit – expired on Sept. 4 but jobless workers are still filing for benefits.

To be sure, the Labor Department data only shows first-time unemployment claims that were filed for the previous week, not those that were successfully processed.

The state has distributed nearly $2 billion in federal and state unemployment benefits to workers since March 2020, when the COVID-19 outbreak began.

New Hampshire’s unemployment rate remained relatively unchanged in October at 2.9%, according to New Hampshire Employment Security.

There were 725,960 people employed in the state in October, the agency said. That’s a decrease of 1,880 from the previous month, but up by 710 from the same month one year ago.

Meanwhile, the number of unemployed workers decreased by 480 to 21,360 between September and October, the state agency reported, which is 14,770 fewer jobless workers than the same month a year ago.

But many employers are still struggling to find workers amid a prolonged hiring crunch that economists say is holding back growth of the pandemic-battered economy.

Many businesses had hoped that the end of the federal unemployment programs would result in a boost in hiring, but that doesn’t appear to have happened.

Nationally, initial filings for unemployment insurance hit a new pandemic low in the previous week in a sign of an improving job market. There were 184,000 new jobless claims filed during the week that ended Dec. 4, an increase of 43,000 from the previous week, according to the Labor Department.Continuing unemployment claims, which lag behind a week, ticked up by 38,000 to about 1.99 million nationally for the week that ended Nov. 27, the agency said.Overall, more than 1.9 million Americans were still receiving state or federal jobless benefits in the week ending Nov. 20, according to the weekly report.

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