- Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development
Media Contact for Massachusetts Weekly Unemployment Claimant Data (06-11-20)
Charles Pearce, Director of Communications, Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development
BOSTON — Massachusetts had 44,660 individuals file an initial claim for standard Unemployment Insurance (UI) from May 31 to June 6, an increase of 17,626 over the previous week. Since March 15, a total of 968,899 initial claims have been filed for UI. At 565,898, continued UI claims decreased by 9,964 or 1.7% over the previous week, the second consecutive week of decline.
There were 20,991, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) initial claims filed for the week ending June 6, 33,290 less than the previous week. Since April 20, 2020, 594,068 claimants have filed for PUA.
The Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which provided up to 13 weeks of extended benefits to individuals who have exhausted or expired their regular unemployment compensation since July 2019 was implemented on May 21. For the week ending June 6, 3,692 PEUC claims were filed bringing the total of PEUC filings to 46,945 since implementation.
Since March, the customer service staff at the Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) has grown from around 50 employees to nearly 2000. The remote customer service operation is now making over 35,000 individual contacts per day and DUA continues to host unemployment town halls – which have been held in English, Spanish, and Portuguese - and have been attended by around 350,000 constituents.
The below charts are relative to standard UI only.
Industry |
Week Ending 5/30 |
Week Ending 6/6 |
Change |
% Change |
Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting |
85 |
117 |
32 |
37.6% |
Mining |
3 |
5 |
2 |
66.7% |
Utilities |
21 |
80 |
59 |
281.0% |
Construction |
890 |
1,269 |
379 |
42.6% |
Manufacturing |
1,698 |
2,075 |
377 |
22.2% |
Wholesale Trade |
796 |
1,252 |
456 |
57.3% |
Retail Trade |
2,752 |
4,836 |
2,084 |
75.7% |
Transportation & Warehouse |
903 |
1,524 |
621 |
68.8% |
Information |
483 |
682 |
199 |
41.2% |
Finance & Insurance |
455 |
789 |
334 |
73.4% |
Real Estate |
301 |
521 |
220 |
73.1% |
Professional and Technical Services |
1,597 |
2,476 |
879 |
55.0% |
Management of Companies |
684 |
1,704 |
1,020 |
149.1% |
Administrative & Waste Services |
1,720 |
3,501 |
1,781 |
103.5% |
Education |
1,541 |
2,228 |
687 |
44.6% |
Health & Social Assistance |
3,279 |
5,908 |
2,629 |
80.2% |
Arts, Entertainment & Recreation |
637 |
872 |
235 |
36.9% |
Food & Accommodation |
2,768 |
4,901 |
2,133 |
77.1% |
Other Services |
1,343 |
2,826 |
1,483 |
110.4% |
Public Administration |
811 |
1,515 |
704 |
86.8% |
Information Not Available |
4,267 |
5,579 |
1,312 |
30.7% |
Initial claims by industry

Continued weeks claimed by industry

Industry share of CWC in most recent week


Below we present demographic statistics on ethnicity, gender, and race for all those claimants who filed for a continued week in the period prior to the above information. This is to say that because of the timing of data availability, the below statistics reflect continued weeks claimed in the week ending May 30th rather than the week ending June 6th.



Claimants by gender


Claimants by ethnicity


Claimants by race


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