CT Unemployment Rate Tied For Second Highest In Country: Report

ACROSS CONNECTICUT — While Connecticut continues to show signs of economic recovery after the pandemic eliminated 292,400 jobs during March and April of 2020, a new WalletHub report shows that the Nutmeg State still has a lot of work to do to improve the job front.

Out of all 50 states and Washington, D.C., the report ranked Connecticut near the bottom at No. 49 for states with unemployment rates that have bounced back the least. The state is in good company, tying with New Mexico. The unemployment rate for the two states last month stood at 7.9 percent. Only Nevada and Hawaii fared worse.

On the other hand, the states with unemployment rates that have bounced back the most include Nebraska (No. 1), Utah (No. 2), Idaho (No. 3), South Dakota (No. 4) and Alabama (No. 5). Those states' unemployment rates ranged from 2.5 to 3.3 percent for last month.

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Meanwhile, Connecticut's Interim Commissioner Danté Bartolomeo said Friday that the state's economy is showing resilience and so is its workforce. She admits, however, the state is not out of the woods yet when it comes to getting more people back into the workforce.

"After reaching a high of 392,000 weekly unemployment filers in May 2020, we are now at 165,000 weekly filers and those numbers are trending down," she said. "We have a long way to go—in a normal year we have about 40,000 claimants filing each week—but the labor numbers and the filing numbers are going in the right direction.”

Overall, June’s jobs report for the country showed much better job growth than the previous month, exceeding expert predictions, the study found. The economy gained 850,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, with notable gains in sectors including leisure and hospitality, public and private education, professional and business services, and retail trade.

In Connecticut, construction and retail trade regained 70 percent or more of the jobs lost during the coronavirus pandemic. The same is true for management of companies, accommodation and food services, and private education — which have added jobs in each of the past two months, CTDOL Director of the Office of Research Patrick Flaherty said.

According to WalletHub, the U.S. unemployment rate currently sits at 5.9 percent, which is still high but is much lower than the nearly historic high of 14.8 percent in April 2020. This overall drop can be attributed largely to a combination of vaccinations and states loosening restrictions.