For Immediate Release: Thursday, July 8, 2010
Contact: Karen Conner or Eve Turow, news@epi.org 202-775-8810

Running out of steam

A key indicator of a job market on the road to recovery is a decline in weekly jobless claims, the number of people filing first-time claims for unemployment insurance. That trend is missing from the current job market, where weekly jobless claims have held steady in the mid-400,000 range for the last four-and-a-half months. Today’s Snapshot tracks the four-week moving average of initial claims for unemployment insurance from early 2007 through the week ending July 3. The country is emerging from the weakest downturn in seven decades but the recovery is excruciatingly slow. The pace of job creation in recent months, while a dramatic improvement over last year’s job losses, is not nearly sufficient to put America’s 14.6 million unemployed workers back to work in the foreseeable future.