Saturday Nov 8 2025 00:00
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According to a foreign media analysis of unadjusted documents released by states during the federal government shutdown, the United States saw an increase in initial jobless claims last week. Initial jobless claims rose to approximately 228,000 in the week ending November 1, from a revised 219,000 the previous week.
Due to the government shutdown, the Department of Labor has not released weekly reports since September 25, but it did provide downloadable data for most states. Foreign media used pre-released weekly seasonal factors from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to adjust this raw data.
Although this calculation method is very close to the official seasonally adjusted data when including data from all states, the latest weekly report is missing data from New Mexico and the Virgin Islands. For this reason, foreign media used the average of the values for the previous four weeks for these regions as a substitute.
According to calculations, continuing jobless claims, a measure of the total number of people receiving benefits, rose slightly from 1.95 million to 1.96 million in the week ending October 25.
Unemployment benefit applications from federal employees fell for the second consecutive week, but remain high. According to data published on the Department of Labor website, the 'Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees' program received a total of 7,445 initial applications in the week ending November 1. This data is also missing information from the two regions mentioned above.
In the week ending October 25, continuing claims by federal employees rose to 30,145, the highest level since January 2019 (during the last government shutdown).
Earlier, according to re-employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., US companies announced the highest number of layoffs in October for the same period in more than two decades. Employers announced a sharp increase in layoffs in October, and year-to-date layoffs have exceeded 1 million, and these figures seem to sound a new alarm about the state of the labor market.
David Tinsley, senior economist at the Bank of America Institute, said of the labor market: “It’s cooling, but not collapsing.”
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