Milwaukee County Unemployment at 14.1%
The City of Milwaukee is at 15.3 percent unemployment.
On March 19th, the downtown Milwaukee Punch Bowl Social laid off 91 employees. Photo by Jennifer Rick.
The latest estimate for Milwaukee County’s unemployment rate is 14.1 percent, which is higher than the state and national unemployment rates.
The state’sDepartment of Workforce Development (DWD) released the preliminary local unemployment rates for in the month of May Thursday. And along with the county’s rate, DWD announced that as of May 20, the unemployment rate in the City of Milwaukee was estimated to be 15.3 percent, down slightly from April’s 15.8 percent.
The latest estimate on the U.S. unemployment rate is 13.3 percent. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics misclassified some workers in their most recent survey, so the actual unemployment rate is likely three percentage points higher, or approximately 6 percent.
Last week, the state reported the preliminary numbers for the month of May show Wisconsin’s unemployment rate at 12 percent.
In the past seven days since the last time Urban Milwaukee reported on new unemployment claims, Wisconsin has seen 26,467 new unemployment claims.
Last week, there were approximately 1.5 million unemployment claims in the U.S. This marks another drop in the weekly unemployment claims, compared to previous weeks. However, as with previous drops during the pandemic, the number of new claims coming in each week vastly outpace the rate of new claims in previous years.
There were also 728,120 claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance in the U.S. last week.
Since the beginning of March, the number of new regular unemployment claims across the country has risen to approximately 48 million. That’s equivalent to approximately 29 percent of the country’s labor force.
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