WA Unemployment Shrinks, But New Claims Rise As Benefits Expire

OLYMPIA, WA — Washington's unemployment rate remains high, even as the federal government moves to cut off pandemic unemployment benefits to millions of Americans.

Those federal programs, which provided jobless aid to the self-employed or gig workers, or to job seekers who had been unemployed for more than six months, both expired on Monday. Oxford Economics estimates that some 8.9 million Americans across the country benefitted from the programs, including many in Washington.

It will take weeks, possibly months before we know exactly how the move will impact Washington's unemployment rate, but the latest data from the state's Employment Security Department suggests that cutting off those benefits may have impacted tens of thousands of Washingtonians.

For the week of Aug. 29 through Sept. 4, the ESD says it received 257,702 unemployment claims, and paid out 197,660 of them. That's a 5.6 percent decrease in claims over the week before, but still more than four times the number of unemployment claims the state was paying before the first pandemic layoffs began in early March 2020.

Put another way, there are at least 150,000 Washingtonians who began receiving unemployment during the pandemic and who are still on unemployment benefits, who likely qualified for and were relying on the weekly $300 offered by the federal pandemic benefit programs.

While some have suggested that cutting off those benefits will give the unemployed the extra push they need to find stable employment, economists say it isn't that simple. As the Associated Press reports, a recent study from economists at Columbia University and the University of Massachusetts found that, in states that kept federal benefit programs, 22 percent of unemployment applicants found work by the end of July, compared to 26 percent in states that cut off unemployment aid earlier this summer. Another study from J.P. Morgan found "zero correlation" between job growth and unemployment aid.

What happens in Washington has yet to be seen — the ESD will release the first post-benefit unemployment numbers late next week — but the silver lining is that unemployment continue to trend downward.

Since the pandemic began in March of last year, the ESD has paid out more than $21.2 billion in unemployment benefits to over 1.1 million Washingtonians.