WASHINGTON — More Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, but U.S. layoffs remain in the same historically healthy range of the past few years.
Applications for unemployment benefits for the week ending Aug. 16 rose by 11,000 to 235,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s slightly more than the 229,000 new applications that economists had forecast.
Weekly applications for jobless benefits are seen as a proxy for layoffs and have mostly settled in a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since the U.S. began to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic more than three years ago.
While layoffs remain low by historical comparisons, there has been noticeable deterioration in the labor market this year and mounting evidence that people are having difficulty finding jobs.
U.S. employers added just 73,000 jobs in July, well short of the 115,000 analysts forecast. Worse, revisions to the May and June figures shaved 258,000 jobs off previous estimates and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1%.
That report sent financial markets spiraling, spurring President Donald Trump to fire Erika McEntarfer, the head of Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tallies the monthly employment numbers. The BLS does not contribute to the weekly unemployment benefits report except to calculate the annual seasonal adjustments.
The BLS reported earlier this week that the unemployment rate in Washington, D.C. eclipsed 6% in July, the third straight month that it was the highest in the U.S.
The rising D.C. jobless rate is a reflection of the mass layoffs of federal workers by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year. An overall decline in international tourism — a main driver of D.C.’s income — is also expected to have an impact on the climbing unemployment rate in the District.
Neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia, where many federal employees reside, also saw an uptick in unemployment rates in July.
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, federal workers across government agencies have been either laid off or asked to voluntarily resign, spurring lawsuits from labor unions and advocacy groups.
Another recent report on the U.S. labor market showed that employers posted 7.4 million job vacancies in June, down from 7.7 million in May. The number of people quitting their jobs — a sign of confidence in finding a better job — fell in June to the lowest level since December.
Some major companies have announced job cuts this year, including Procter & Gamble, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Google and Facebook parent company Meta. Intel and The Walt Disney Co. also recently announced staff reductions.
Many economists contend that Trump’s erratic rollout of tariffs against U.S. trading partners has created uncertainty for employers, who have grown reluctant to expand their payrolls.
The Labor Department’s report Thursday showed that the four-week average of claims, which softens some of the week-to-week swings, rose by 4,500 to 226,500.
The total number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits for the previous week of Aug. 9 jumped by 30,000 to 1.97 million, the most since November 6, 2021.