On the surface, Idaho’s employment news is getting better. Look deeper.
On the surface, the news about the coronavirus’ impact on Idaho workers is getting better. Many businesses that closed in late March have reopened. New applications for unemployment compensation are falling. Some laid-off workers are going back to work.
The positive trends were reinforced Thursday by the state’s report that 3,646 people filed initial unemployment claims last week, a 23% decline from the previous week and an 89% decline from the peak of nearly 33,000 who applied in the last week of March.
Continuing claims, from workers laid off previously, fell too: a 10% decline in one week to just over 51,000. That suggests that many of the 145,000 new claimants since the pandemic reached Idaho have gone back to work, though how many is not known.
But there’s another, less rosy way to look at the data:
Last week’s 3,646 new claims rivaled the worst weeks of the Great Recession. From October 2008 through December 2009, initial unemployment claims averaged 3,800 per week, according to Craig Shaul, an Idaho Department of Labor economist.
The largest share of the new layoffs is coming in the health care and social-assistance category (social assistance includes day care, counseling, and mental-health and substance-abuse care). Health care and social assistance accounted for 13% of last week’s jobless claims.
Until March, health care was a reliable source of job growth.
“I’m concerned with how long that will persist,” Shaul said by phone. “Health care and social assistance were bulletproof before the coronavirus.”
Patients’ fear of the contagion, the postponenment of elective medical procedures, the need to keep patients and workers socially distant from one another in hospitals and clinics, and the rise of telemedicine all may be feeding the new trend, Shaul said.
“It might be that this is a temporary thing,” he said. “If there’s a vaccine later this year, maybe that will have some effect. If we talk about this next year, maybe we’ll view this conversation as too pessimistic. I hope.”
Idaho is in sync with the national trend in declining unemployment claims. But some economists worry that the national recovery could be slow, prolonging unemployment.
“While the drop in new claims is welcome news and more evidence that the worst of the job losses are behind us, the recovery in the labor market is expected to be painfully slow,” Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, told the Associated Press on Thursday. He predicted “a two-phase recovery,” with an initial burst in rehiring followed by a much slower replacement of other job losses.
Many restaurants, bars and theaters remain closed. On Thursday, AMC Theatres, the world’s largest movie-theater chain, said it has “substantial doubts” about its survival. (The company has no theaters in the Treasure Valley.)
And retailers are struggling, with some failing, contributing to job losses in Idaho and elsewhere.
Pier 1 Imports is closing its stores, including two in the Treasure Valley. Gordmans, the department store chain, filed for bankruptcy and is closing its stores, too. So is Tuesday Morning, the home-decor chain. J.C. Penney also filed for bankruptcy and is closing some stores. L Brands plans to close some Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, and Pink stores.
Unemployment call center besieged
Meanwhile, some Idahoans have gone without unemployment aid despite two months or more of waiting as bills pile up.
The Department of Labor was not staffed to handle the onslaught of claims that began in March, and it has struggled to take on new programs Congress assigned to state labor departments as part of a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief law.
The state engaged a 30-person call center that began accepting calls Monday from jobless workers who still haven’t received unemployment benefits. The state has a backlog of questions about claimants’ eligibility that it must research before authorizing payments.
The center was immediately flooded with calls, prompting messages asking callers to try again later. Some callers were still getting those messages Thursday.
The call center is operated by Maximus, a Virginia company that has provided other call-center services to Idaho in recent years.
This story was originally published June 4, 2020 at 2:34 PM.
