Press Release Massachusetts Weekly Unemployment Claimant Data 8-27-20

Massachusetts — Massachusetts from August 16 to August 22 had 17,136 individuals file an initial claim for regular Unemployment Insurance (UI), the second consecutive week of increases, up 463 over the previous week. Increases in initial claims filings were widespread among all sectors and may continue to be the verification that claimants who have exhausted or expired their regular unemployment compensation are not eligible for a new UI claim before filing for other UI programs. From March 15 to August 22, a total of 1,208,132 have filed an initial claim for regular UI. For the tenth consecutive week of decreases, continued UI claims for week ending August 22, at 412,165 were down 16,810 or 3.9 percent over the previous week.

The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) initial claims filed for the week ending August 22 at 12,617, a small increase of 335 over the previous week. Since April 20, 2020, 734,712 claimants have filed an initial claim for the PUA.    

The Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which provided up to 13 weeks of extended benefits, was implemented on May 21. For the week ending August 12, 5,957 PEUC initial claims were filed, just 86 more than the previous week but bringing the total of PEUC filings to over 100,000 at 101,178 since implementation.

Initial Claims Filed

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 August 15th rather than the week ending August 22nd.

Claimants by Gender

  
Claimants by Ethnicity
 

 
Claimants by Race
 

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