KALAMAZOO, MI (WHTC-AM/FM) – The jobless numbers are bad, and they’re probably going to get worse.
Thursday’s weekly report by the US Department of Labor showed that more than 3.1 million workers nationwide filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week. While this is a half a million fewer than the previous week, it still means that over 33 million Americans lost their jobs in the past seven weeks.
Dr. Brian Long, director of Supply Management Research at Grand Valley State University, says that there doesn’t appear to be any lifting of these high and thick unemployment clouds anytime soon. “It will probably continue to be so until we start to open up additional sections of the economy,” he said on “WHTC Morning News” during his monthly interview on Thursday. “This crisis, regrettably, is still just beginning. It’s not really going to be over until we have a vaccine, or some kind of a therapeutic treatment that is a ‘silver bullet’ of sorts.”
In a monthly survey of local purchasing managers that comprises his “Current Business Trends” in manufacturing and employment in West Michigan, Dr. Long admitted that the April report is one of the weakest in the 40-year history of the polling, but wasn’t a record low, and that it wasn’t “as bad as expected.”
