From the Pennsylvania Capital-Star (https://www.penncapital-star.com/):
There’s absolutely no way to paint a pretty picture when it comes to the unemployment situation in Pennsylvania.
To date, the state has paid out a staggering $7 billion in benefits, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. And nearly 27 percent of the state’s workforce — or 1.8 million of our friends, neighbors and co-workers — have now filed claims with a system that has struggled to keep pace with the demand, the Inquirer further reports.
But if there is one grain of good news in this sea of economic devastation, it’s that Pennsylvania could be faring far, far worse. The Keystone State had the 3rd smallest increase in unemployment nationwide last week, according to an updated analysis by the financial literacy site WalletHub.
To reach that conclusion, WalletHub’s analysts said they “compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on increases in unemployment claims. We used this data to rank the most impacted states in both the latest week for which we have data (May 4) and overall since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis (March 16).”
After the jump, a look at how Pennsylvania fared, according to both metrics, and how the Keystone State stacked up to its neighbors.
Pennsylvania finished 49th nationwide in the new WalletHub analysis, the 3rd lowest increase in the country last week. The state was in 34th place overall, when looking at unemployment increases since the start of the pandemic in March.
Here’s how neighboring states compared:
- Delaware: 32nd in the recent analysis, and 32nd since the start of the pandemic.
- Maryland: 13th in the recent analysis, and 26th since the start of the pandemic.
- New Jersey: 37th in the recent analysis, and 43rd since the start of the pandemic.
- New York: 27th in the recent analysis, and 40th since the start of the pandemic.
- Ohio: 35th in the recent analysis, and 20th since the start of the pandemic.
- West Virginia: 43rd in the recent analysis, and 29th since the start of the pandemic.
So how to help those displaced workers? One expert says the CARES Act, which sent cash payments to millions of Americans, was a start, but didn’t go far enough.
“Twelve-hundred-dollar checks are great, but they only come once. Expanded unemployment benefits are good, and should have been that way all along,” Christopher Hayes, a labor historian at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told WalletHub. “A whole lot of people are going to be shut out of health insurance, having lost whatever their employers provided. COBRA and Obamacare are too expensive for many.
“These packages will certainly not ensure full relief, as our national libertarian impulses tell us that such measures are wrong, and business interests wouldn’t allow them to go the distance anyway,” Hayes continued. “The Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which temporarily provides paid sick and family leave, excludes workers at firms with more than 500 employees. That’s about half of all employed Americans. Another quarter can be easily denied benefits because they work for organizations with fewer than 50 employees. Enormous numbers of Americans will be left in the cold.”
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