Wisconsin Unemployment Rate at 12%

On March 19th, the downtown Milwaukee Punch Bowl Social laid off 91 employees. Photo by Jennifer Rick.

Preliminary numbers from the month of May show Wisconsin’s unemployment rate at 12 percent.

This is slight drop from April’s 13.6 percent. However, the May unemployment rate is still approximately quadruple what it was a year ago.

While the number of new unemployment insurance claims each week has dropped in recent weeks, it has begun to level off.

For the third week in a row, the number of new claims seen each week is holding steady. The four week moving average for new unemployment claims nationally is 1.7 million a week.

The U.S. Department of Labor reported that the country saw 1.5 million new claims last week. So as of last week, the country has seen 42.7 million new unemployment claims since the beginning of March.

On top of regular unemployment insurance claims, last week 760,526 people applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance across the country. So, approximately 2.2 million regular and pandemic unemployment claims were filed last week.

In the seven days since the last time Urban Milwaukee reported on new unemployment claims, Wisconsin has seen 23,602 new claims. Bringing the total number of new claims since March 15 to 677,948.

The May jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the unemployment rate nationally to be 13.3 percent. However, because it misclassified some workers in their survey, the actual unemployment rate is likely three percentage points higher, or 16 percent.