Pennsylvania’s jobless rate jumped to 6% in March, up 1.3 percentage points from February, but a local economist believes it is just the tip of an iceberg of bad unemployment news.
“It’s going to get a lot worse in April,” said Jake Haulk, an economist and president emeritus of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, a Castle Shannon-based think tank. He expects to see the rate jump to more than 20% this month because of the skyrocketing unemployment claims.
Data for the state’s March unemployment rate were collected in mid-March, at the beginning of Gov. Tom Wolf’s order to shut down thousands of what the state deemed non-life-sustaining businesses on March 19 in an effort to stop the spread of covid-19, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry.
The labor department said this week it has received 1.4 million initial unemployment claims since Wolf’s order.
The jobless rate for the seven-county Pittsburgh region in March will not be released by the state until April 28.
“We’re just at the beginning edge of this, if it (the shutdown) is not reversed soon,” Haulk said of the high jobless rate.
