Art Woolf is a columnist for VTDigger. He recently retired as an associate professor of economics at the University of Vermont.
The pace of layoffs continues to moderate in Vermont. In the final week of April, 3,875 workers were laid off, down more than 1,000 from the week before and well below the peak of 16,500 in early April. Still, last week’s total was 10 times higher than the number of layoffs during the same week last year.
We will probably continue to see several thousand people submitting first-time claims for unemployment insurance until significant economic improvement occurs — and that could take months.
Also last week 60,535 Vermonters received unemployment insurance checks. But here is where it gets strange. The week before more than 76,000 Vermonters received an unemployment insurance check. Nationally, there were 4 million more people getting checks than the week before, a 24% increase.
Vermont is not alone in seeing a decline in the number of people getting checks. Nationally, 14 states also experienced a decline. But Vermont had the biggest percentage decline of any state in the nation.
It could be that Vermont’s economy improved so much last week that firms were hiring people and they went off unemployment. That’s unlikely.
Or firms finally were approved for the federal government’s Payroll Protection Program (PPP), the Small Business Administration program that loans firms money if they agree not to lay off workers. It is possible that firms got these forgivable loans and rehired furloughed workers who were then ineligible for unemployment insurance benefits.
Finally, some of the decline could be because those workers who lost traditional unemployment benefits were covered by the federal government’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program and they are not yet showing up in the data as receiving PUA checks.
If that is the case, we should be seeing a huge uptick in the number of people receiving unemployment insurance benefits from the state and federal governments when next week’s data are released. But it’s still unusual and curious that Vermont had the biggest decline in unemployment insurance checks of any state in the nation. All of those reasons for Vermont’s decline pertain to other states as well.
