Fewer American workers filed for unemployment benefits last week as opposed to the week before as layoffs hold at historically low levels.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that 206,000 Americans filed for unemployment assistance in the week ending Feb. 14. That’s a drop of 23,000 from the previous week, and is lower than the 225,000 new applications experts were expecting, The Associated Press reported.
Filings for unemployment benefits are viewed as representative of U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.
It’s another piece of good employment news from the Labor Department, which earlier this month reported that U.S. employers added 130,000 jobs in January and that the unemployment rate fell to 4.3% from 4.4%. Government revisions did, however, cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands, reducing the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000. That’s about one-third of the previously reported 584,000 and the weakest since the pandemic year of 2020, the AP reported.
While weekly layoffs have remained in a historically low range mostly between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years, a number of high-profile companies have announced job cuts recently, including UPS, Amazon, Dow and the Washington Post in recent weeks.
The Labor Department also recently reported that job openings fell in December to the lowest level in more than five years.
The Labor Department’s report Thursday showed that the four-week moving average of jobless claims, which tempers some of the week-to-week volatility, decreased by 1,000 to 219,000. The total number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the previous week ending Feb. 7 increased to 1.87 million, up 17,000 from the previous week, according to the government.
