US Unemployment Benefits Double, Hits Record 6.65m

• US Unemployment Benefits Double, Hits Record 6.65m

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits rose by 3.35 million to a record 6.65 million as lockdown bites amid a scary sign of an economic collapse due to coronavirus.

The labor department on Thursday said the new record number were people who lost their jobs in the week ending 27 March.

This was after a record 3.3 million filed for unemployment in the previous week, bringing the total number of applications received in the last two weeks to 9.95 million.

The US unemployment rate was 3.5 percent barely a month ago has now risen to 17 percent in just two weeks while the rate of unemployment in the African American community jumped from 5.8 percent to 19 percent during the same period.

“We’ve lived through the recession and 9/11. What we’re seeing with this decline is actually worse than both of those events,” said Irina Novoselsky, CEO of online jobs marketplace CareerBuilder.

“Minorities are being disproportionately affected in the displacement,” Novoselsky said. “So a lot of the positive wage differential that we’d seen shrinking over the past 10 years both from females and African Americans, we’re going to see some of it going away.”