Jobless claims fall to lowest in decade as Biden works to revive economy hit by Covid

Economy is recovering but high inflation, rising prices of energy and other goods remain persistent issues

The number of Americans filing for unemployment dropped by 5,000 last week to 166,000 total claims, the lowest such number since 1968, according to the US Labour Department.

In a statement, President Joe Biden hailed the announcement as evidence that American workers “are back to work,” and noted that the number of new claims — a statistic which is commonly used to track how many people lost their jobs in the previous week — was lower than “any time in our nation’s recorded history.”

Mr Biden boasted that the US economy’s addition of 7.9 million new jobs since he assumed the presidency last year was more than have been added under any of his 45 predecessors, giving “millions of families … a little more breathing room and the dignity a job provides,” and attributed the job growth to the American Rescue Plan coronavirus relief package he signed into law last spring.

“While we have more work to do to combat Putin’s Price Hike and lower costs for families, today’s data demonstrate that America is on the move again and the economy is uniquely well-positioned to overcome the global challenges brought on by the pandemic and Putin’s War of Choice,” he said.

The announcement of record low unemployment claims comes on the heels of last week’s release of data showing the US unemployment rate at 3.6 per cent of the American population, the lowest since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

The Labour Department said the US economy added 431,000 last month, with “notable” gains across “leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, retail trade, and manufacturing,” while the total number of unemployed persons in the US fell by 318,000 to a level of 6 million — a number it described as “little different” from the pre-pandemic unemployment rate under former president Donald Trump.