Initial claims showed only minor easing for the week of October 24, with unemployment still well above prior levels as pandemic-related closures remain throughout most of the state. Initial claims in the regular program for California eased 4.9% from the prior week, while dipping 3.7% for the US (not seasonally adjusted) as a whole. Combined with the initial PUA claims covering the self-employed and other categories of workers, total claims eased 3.8% in California and 1.2% in the US.

Total claims in the rest of the US continue to be relatively level since the second week of August. The new EDD provisions have brought the California trend down more in line with the other states’ but still at an elevated level.

There are no updates yet from EDD on the backlog data, with the most recent results still from the week of October 21.

Initial claims data for the regular UI program continues to show that unemployment stemming from the closures affects lower wage workers more heavily. The chart below shows the distribution by industry for September 2020 compared to a year ago. The data reflects only claims where the industry is known—this information was not available for 26% of claims in September 2020 and 15% of claims in 2019.

But as indicated, initial claims are far more concentrated in lower wage Retail Trade ($37.7k average annual wage from the most current Quarterly Census of Employment & Wages), Accommodation & Food Services ($26.3k), and Other Services ($41.9k) along with Healthcare & Social Assistance ($53.1k) that contains much lower average wages in the Social Assistance ($20.9k) component. The equity implications are that lower wage workers continue to experience an outsized portion of the economic harm and, as the length of unemployment continues to grow, longer-term implications to their life-time earnings potential and ability to regain employment once a recovery begins to take hold.