Weekly U.S. initial jobless claims rise by 8,000
The total number of seasonally adjusted initial unemployment claims for the week were 247,000, -- 8,000 higher than the previous week.
The four-week moving average of initial unemployment claims was also 8,000 higher for a total of 1,895,250. It's the highest since November 27, 2021 when it was 1,923,500.
"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 208,642 in the week ending May 31, a decrease of 3,128 (or -1.5%) from the previous week. The seasonal factors had expected a decrease of 10,505 (or -5.0%) from the previous week. There were 196,177 initial claims in the comparable week in 2024," The Labor Department said in a statement.
The jobless claims report comes as U.S. layoffs are 47% higher this May than last, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
The insured unemployment rate - meaning the percentage of the workforce covered by unemployment insurance and receiving benefits - was 1.2% for the week ending May 24.
Highest number of initial jobless claims came in Michigan (+3,259), Nebraska (+1,328), California (+ 1.041), Florida (+977) and Virginia (+947).
The largest decreases were in Massachusetts (-747), Illinois (-744), Texas (-601), Washington (-307), and New York (-259).
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Business News
33 minutes ago
- Time Business News
The Rise of USA-Africa Flights Opens Up New Opportunities For Travelers
For years, U.S. travelers wanting to visit Africa couldn't escape long, complicated trips with many stops. A vacation in Africa was a dream that required a lot of planning and patience. Luckily, things are changing. Flights between the United States and Africa are now more accessible, frequent, and traveler-friendly than ever before, with more and more tours to Africa becoming available everyday. This increase was caused by high demand and the need for more transcontinental routes. Getting to Africa is no longer the hard part; it's just the start of the adventure. Whether you're interested in ancient cultures, exciting safaris, or the business opportunities in Africa's growing economies, now is the time to go! More and more U.S. airlines are putting money into direct and one-stop flights to Africa through added, more frequent routes and codeshares. This makes it easier for Americans to see all that the continent has to offer. There are now flights from cities such as New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Chicago to prominent African cities like Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, and Cape Town. Delta is one of the companies that has led this change. Over the years, the number of flights to Africa has steadily grown. Travelers looking for Delta flights from New York to Africa or connections through Atlanta are finding it easier and more comfortable to travel, with shorter travel times and easier connections across Africa. United and American Airlines, among others, have also added more flights, which has led to healthy competition and new ideas across the board, such as better service on flights, lower prices, and more flexible schedules. Africa is one of the most diverse continents in the world. It has more than 50 countries, many ecosystems, and a wide range of cultures, languages, and landscapes. However, for a long time, a lack of flights made it difficult for many Americans to access this wealth of experiences. A trip to Africa is no longer just a 'once in a lifetime' dream; it's a real, repeatable travel option now that air travel has become more accessible. These flights are more than just a way to get from one place to another. They are also for business travel, connecting with people from the diaspora, tourism, and humanitarian work, making it easier for people to get to know each other and build bridges between countries. The rise in flights between the U.S. and Africa means that safari dreams are easier to realize. Smoother air connections mean less time in transit and more time on the ground, whether you're going to the grasslands of the Serengeti or on a game drive in the Kruger National Park. Direct flights also make it easier to switch between airlines and find lost luggage, which is great for anyone who is travelling with gear or has a tight schedule. Travelers today want flexibility, dependability, and a smooth booking process, and that's exactly what U.S. airlines are giving them. Delta Africa flights are especially known for being on time, comfortable, and having outstanding customer service. Their reputation makes them a favorite among both new and experienced travelers to Africa. There are more flights between the U.S. and Africa than ever. The question is no longer 'Can I get there?' but 'Where do I want to go first?' TIME BUSINESS NEWS
Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Immigrant population in US drops for the first time in decades
Advertisement But experts predict looming negative economic and demographic consequences for the United States if the trend persists. Immigrants are a crucial workforce in many sectors, and the country's reliance on them is growing as more baby boomers retire. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up After campaigning on a promise of mass deportations, Trump has introduced sweeping measures to reduce immigration. His administration has restricted access to asylum at the southern border, tightened visa requirements for students and tech workers, and deployed thousands of federal agents to detain and deport immigrants without lawful status. The crackdown has led immigrants to leave the country voluntarily and has discouraged others from coming. Lillian Divina Leite, 46, chose to use the government's new self-deportation program to return to Brazil. A housekeeper in Charlotte, N.C., Leite said that she had begun to panic when she saw immigrants being 'hunted down like hardened criminals.' Advertisement 'I got really scared,' said Leite, who had fallen out of legal status after overstaying a six-month tourist visa. 'I thought, I haven't done anything wrong in my life,' she said, 'and suddenly I could be imprisoned.' Despite the study's findings, Kevin Lynn, executive director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy, which advocates for less immigration, said that foreign workers who enter lawfully continue to pour into the United States and undermine Americans. 'There has been no letup,' he said. 'People coming here legally, whether on green cards or employment visas, are impacting American workers at all strata, whether low-skilled or high-skilled.' Net migration — the difference between the number of immigrants arriving and departing — has turned negative, a shift that the chief Pew demographer, Jeffrey Passel, called a 'demographic certainty' so far in 2025. His team's analysis did not calculate a separate number for immigrants without lawful status who seem likely to represent the largest number of departures, because heightened enforcement probably diminished immigrants' participation in the census survey that was used to make estimates, he said. They may have been undercounted, which would suggest the drop is not as severe, or their low participation could mask an even more striking decline. The United States experienced negative net immigration in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when between 400,000 and 1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans left, many under coercive repatriation programs. In July, the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute projected net migration in 2025 would be flat or would even drop and predicted that the Trump administration's policies would continue to squeeze out low- and high-skilled foreign workers at least through 2026. Advertisement 'A rapid decline in immigration is going to cause economic harm,' said Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the report. Political pushback and legal challenges could lead the Trump administration to ease its crackdown and, thus, soften the impact, she said. But legislation recently passed by the Republican-controlled Congress has significantly increased funding for immigration enforcement, suggesting that the restrictive approach could extend throughout Trump's term. If so, 'we could go into a spiral of continued decline,' said Watson, which could undermine US competitiveness for global talent. 'If things are really bad, we no longer are the place where people go to do science or tech, and that could have generational repercussions,' she said. In addition to targeting migrants without lawful status, the administration has introduced measures that have undermined legal immigration. It has paused the refugee program, which offered green cards and a path to citizenship to people fleeing persecution. It has increased screening and vetting of visa applicants, which experts expect will reduce the numbers of foreign workers and students. The Trump administration has ended several Biden-era programs that had allowed people from troubled countries to live and work temporarily in the United States. Thousands of immigrants are set to lose their protected status in coming months. Migration across the southern border, which had begun to slow under asylum restrictions imposed late in the term of President Joe Biden, has declined further since Trump returned to office. Employment opportunities have long been the primary draw for immigrants, with migration typically slowing during economic downturns. During the Great Recession, more Mexicans without authorized status left the United States than arrived. Advertisement But the current decline is unfolding in response to stringent policies and at a time when the United States needs immigration to offset a falling birthrate and an aging population. 'We have more and more people over 65 and not in the workforce,' said Dowell Myers, a demography professor at the University of Southern California. 'A new baby won't help us for 20 years, but a young immigrant helps us immediately.' 'If you take a sledgehammer to the labor force by cutting immigrant flows,' he said, 'we are all going to be seeing the consequences in our everyday lives.' Restaurants, farms, and assisted-living facilities are already grappling with labor shortages that could become more pronounced, he said. Many of those roles are filled by unauthorized immigrants, whose population reached 14 million in 2023, according to Pew, and who accounted for 4 percent of the total US population and about a quarter of the foreign-born population. California had the most unauthorized residents in 2023, at 2.3 million, followed closely by Texas, with 2.1 million. Florida had the largest increase, adding 700,000 for a total of 1.6 million. Through mid-2024, the unauthorized population continued to grow at a fast clip, before starting to contract following policy changes in 2025, according to a preliminary Pew analysis. About half of the 14 million unauthorized immigrants in 2023 had been in the United States for more than a decade, and 4.6 million US-born children have parents who are in the country without lawful status. Pew's estimates are based on an analysis of Census Bureau data, including the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey. Advertisement The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is holding a record 60,000 immigrants in detention, and that number is expected to soar as planned facilities open. Confined immigrants often agree to be swiftly deported rather than languish in custody while awaiting court rulings on whether they can remain in the United States. This article originally appeared in
Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Atlantic
A MAHA Progress Report
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent the past six months working fast to embed his Make America Healthy Again creed into American life. Over the summer alone, he has struck deals with some food companies to phase out some petroleum-based food dyes, waged a war against pediatricians over COVID-19 vaccines for young children, seemingly toyed with the idea of shipping fresh food to Americans in ' MAHA boxes,' and pledged to reboot the nation's dietary guidelines from scratch. I spoke with the Atlantic staff writer Nicholas Florko, who reports on health policy, about how the MAHA-fication of the country is coming along. Nicholas Florko: We've seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. take actions that will weaken our vaccination system in the United States, confirming some of public health's worst fears. But there have also been some surprising successes in his term. RFK Jr. has embraced the role of a dealmaker, and we've seen him leaning on food companies in particular to change their offerings and get rid of synthetic dyes. He's been able to do that simply by asking and by making handshake agreements, as opposed to what we would normally expect from a health secretary—for him to use his regulatory power to force these changes. Stephanie: Why are these handshake agreements proving successful? Nicholas: Food companies likely realize that it's in their best interest to get on the good side of the Trump administration. We see this throughout all sectors of business, but for the food sector, these changes are small enough that companies can make them without dramatically hurting their bottom line, while also earning a lot of brownie points with the administration. Stephanie: That reminds me of President Donald Trump's announcement in July that Coca-Cola, famously his favorite drink, had agreed to make their soda with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup. To what extent is Trump influencing health policy? Does RFK Jr. have a lot of latitude? Nicholas: The Coca-Cola issue is an interesting one because while it's true that RFK Jr. is very anti–high-fructose corn syrup, he's also publicly called sugar a 'poison.' So this is one of those instances where you wonder what is behind RFK Jr. supporting this change. He must know that this isn't actually going to significantly improve public health, but also probably realizes that this is important to his boss. That being said, I think that RFK Jr. does have some latitude. If you left Trump to his own devices, you probably wouldn't see the same level of aggression toward food companies overall, unless he had a personal stake in the situation. Stephanie: With back-to-school season under way, many students are getting up-to-date on their shots. How does this year's vaccination season compare to years past? Nicholas: We haven't seen huge changes, but we are seeing some hints of what might come. Much of the action thus far is around COVID vaccines. In February the president issued a largely symbolic executive order barring schools from enforcing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, but by the time that was issued, virtually no schools actually had such a policy. RFK Jr. also softened the CDC's recommendation for kids to get the COVID-19 vaccine. That's probably been one of his most controversial decisions, prompting a high-profile clash with pediatricians; a leading pediatrics group put out its own suggestions saying that children should be getting vaccinated. But we haven't seen major changes to the other vaccines typically required for returning to school. Stephanie: That disagreement must make it confusing for parents to know who to listen to. Nicholas: It's reasonable to assume that a good portion of people will listen to RFK Jr., but those people may be already skeptical of vaccines and see him as a trustworthy messenger, versus folks who are on the fence. I think that's really the question: Where do those people who are on the fence go? Do they take RFK Jr.'s suggestion, or do they trust their doctor? Stephanie: In May, you wrote a story that was alarming for salad lovers, specifically about how bagged lettuce should be avoided. What's happening with America's food-safety system? Nicholas: One of the earliest, most concerning changes for food safety happened when DOGE came into the federal agencies. Advisory committees focused on food-safety questions were shut down. People were being laid off—such as the administrative staff in charge of making sure that inspectors can go out to farms. Some layoffs seem to have been rescinded, but there's a broad worry about what will happen to the day-to-day operations that we all depend on to keep us safe. Stephanie: A recent story about the recall of frozen shrimp with potential radioactive contamination has caused a bit of a panic about where America's food safety is headed. How did you take that news? Nicholas: One thing that gives me some hope is the fact that this is the sort of thing that we caught, and there have been recalls by Walmart. That's really the big fear when it comes to food safety: that if we attack these federal programs, they're not going to be able to actually find the food that might get us sick before a lot of people get sick. So I think this is actually a good sign that things are working relatively well. Stephanie: Out of all the stories you've written this past summer about the MAHA movement, is there one that keeps you up at night? And is there one that makes you feel hopeful for where American health and safety is going? Nicholas: Honestly, the stories that keep me up at night are by our colleague Katie Wu. Her recent one on RFK Jr.'s COVID revenge campaign has really stuck with me. My own story that both keeps me up at night and that makes me hopeful is related to states, which are taking up the MAHA charge in a very quick fashion. It's felt like Republican governors and legislatures are all trying to out-MAHA one another to ingratiate themselves to Trump and to RFK Jr. Some of these ideas are good from a public-health perspective, but these states are doing a lot of things really fast, which is what worries me. For example, some states are blocking people from using food stamps to buy soda and other junk food. There's a question of how that policy will be implemented, how the attempts to enact these restrictions could affect the entire food-stamp system. Other states have passed laws banning artificial dyes in their school meals. Again, it's one of those ideas that's a good step, but the devil is in the details of how it's executed. How does this flurry of activity in the states actually affect people in the coming months? Does this ultimately make America healthier, or does it send our food system into chaos? Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today's News A New York appeals court voided the roughly $500 million civil-fraud penalty against President Donald Trump, calling it 'excessive,' but upheld the finding that Trump and his company committed long-running business fraud. Business restrictions on Trump in New York remain, and the state plans to appeal. More immigrants are leaving the U.S. than arriving, according to the Pew Research Center. The shift, affected by Trump's strict immigration policies, is the first of its kind since the 1960s. California lawmakers passed the first of three bills on a redistricting plan backed by Governor Gavin Newsom that would shift as many as five Republican-held U.S. House seats toward Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms. The move comes a day after Texas state House Republicans passed a new congressional map that could add five U.S. House seats for the GOP. Evening Read What We Gain When We Stop Caring By Anna Holmes Sometime in the early aughts, the comedian Amy Poehler made a vulgar joke while sitting in the Saturday Night Live writers' room waiting for a midweek read-through to begin. As detailed in Tina Fey's 2011 memoir, Bossypants, Jimmy Fallon, who was also in the show's cast at the time, jokingly recoiled and told Poehler to stop it. 'It's not cute!' Fallon exclaimed. 'I don't like it.' 'Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,' Fey writes. ''I don't fucking care if you like it.'' Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Read. In 2022, The Atlantic 's Culture writers recommended the books that they read too late —but that you should read now. Take a look. This is how the 17th-century painter Rachel Ruysch became one of the greatest still-life painters in the history of art, Zachary Fine writes. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
