Art Woolf is a columnist for VTDigger. He recently retired as an associate professor of economics at the University of Vermont.
The latest weekly update from the Vermont Department of Labor shows a continuing improvement in the state’s economy, although it is still far from normal or healthy.
Last week, 1,480 Vermont workers applied for unemployment insurance, the seventh consecutive week of declining applications. During the worst of the economic shutdown at the end of March, more than 16,500 workers applied for benefits in one week, a record high.
Despite the downward trend in applications, the number of people being laid off and applying for benefits is still nearly three times higher than it was earlier this year and about at the same level as the worst months of the Great Recession in 2009.
Currently, 50,300 Vermonters are receiving regular unemployment insurance benefits. It’s been at roughly that level for the past four weeks. The good news is that the number is not rising. The bad news is that it’s 10 times what it was earlier this year.
Finally, about 14,000 formerly self-employed Vermonters are receiving special Pandemic Unemployment Assistance checks, paid for by the federal government. That number has been slowly rising, but it’s hard to figure out how much of that is due to more people applying for the program and how much to the gradually unwinding of the backlog of applications that has plagued the state’s unemployment computer system.
A total of nearly 65,000 Vermonters are receiving some form of unemployment insurance, about 20% of the state’s labor force. As Gov. Phil Scott slowly loosens the spigot, as he describes the process, we should see the number of people receiving unemployment insurance benefits fall.
But the process of getting back to whatever normal means in the future will be slow and painful. I think that by the end of this year we will still see unemployment — and the number of people receiving unemployment benefits — much higher than it has been since the Great Recession, and even at a level close to what it was in those dismal times.
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