Heavy snow caused layoffs increasing jobless claims to 468,000 as unemployment lines got just a little longer. Count that and add in that many state agencies were closed due to the extreme weather and you have the perfect storm as the backlog jam is in the process of getting caught up.

Instead of the Wall Street analysis number being 455,000 claims rose by 22,000 to the 468,000 number. I guess there is no accounting in down town New York for the weather. Construction companies all along the middle and upper east coast were halted by the weather as well as other weather sensitive related companies.

In addition to the new found additional 22,000, the four week average, used to maintain some semblance of lack of volatility, rose by 6,000 making the total out of work an additional 30,000. That’s a bad figure as it appears that companies are continuing to cut back on their employees.

Among the states, North Carolina had biggest increase in claims, with 5,897, which it attributed to layoffs in the construction, furniture and mining industries. Pennsylvania and Kentucky also reported large increases. The state data lags initial claims by one week.

California reported the largest drop in claims, with 5,540, which it attributed to fewer layoffs in services. Illinois, New York, Texas and Missouri recorded the next largest decreases.

There is increased hope that the new jobs bill will begin to level out the unemployment numbers and make some progress towards the positive as opposed to the increased unemployment numbers that are still trending the wrong way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 9:12 am and is filed under Employment News, US Business News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.