Illinois Sees 5th Fastest Recovery Amid Pandemic: WalletHub

ILLINOIS — Even as Illinois struggles to reopen its economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, the state has had one of the fastest recoveries in the country, according to WalletHub. Of 50 states and the District of Columbia, the personal finance site ranks Illinois 5th — behind Vermont, New Jersey, Oregon and Connecticut — when it comes to the drop in new unemployment claims filed since the start of the pandemic.

While unemployment in the state remains high at 14.6 percent, it has fallen significantly since April, when it was 17.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while April saw a record 519,269 initial jobless claims, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security, by June claims had dropped to 197,192 — a reduction of nearly two-thirds.

Fastest recovery since the start of the pandemic:

1. Connecticut
2. Oregon
3. New Jersey
4. Vermont
5. Illinois

Slowest recovery since the start of the pandemic:

1. Georgia
2. Florida
3. New Hampshire
4. Oklahoma
5. Virginia

Make no mistake, the economic situation is still bad, both across Illinois and around the country. According to Worker Adjustment and Retraining notices published by the state, large Illinois employers announced more than 15,100 permanent layoffs and furloughs in June. (July notices have not yet been published.)

But the data shows things could be a lot worse.

For example, according to WalletHub, Illinois has seen a 901 percent increase in unemployment claims since the start of the pandemic, compared to the same period last year. While that number sounds bad — and it is — it's far from the 3,447 percent increase seen in Georgia.

But, as new coronavirus cases spike across the state, there are also signs Illinois' recovery could be slowing.

In terms of recent changes in unemployment claims, the state isn't doing quite as well. Workers across the state filed 227 percent more jobless claims during the latest week for which there is data than during the same period last year. By that metric, Illinois ranks 7th. And the state saw 110 percent more unemployment claims that week compared to the start of 2020. By that metric, Illinois is all the way down at number 27.

According to WalletHub, the pandemic has wiped out every new job created since the end of the Great Recession, and then some. About 8.8 million jobs were lost from 2007 to 2009, while about 22.7 million new jobs have been created since 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

More than 55.2 million jobs have disappeared just since March.

Source: WalletHub

Peter Cole, a professor specializing in labor and working-class history at Western Illinois University, says those numbers may not capture the true economic and human cost of the pandemic.

"There is no ideal way to measure unemployment," he told WalletHub. "The conventional method, the so-called unemployment (UE) rate only counts people actively seeking work. Hence, if someone has given up on finding a job, magically that person disappears from the UE rate, thereby artificially undercounting the actual number of unemployed people.

"In addition, there are millions (including before the pandemic) who are underemployed, i.e. working part-time, but want/need to work full-time; those people are not counted in the UE rate," Cole continued. "Thus, if the official UE is 4%, it's actually higher. Always."

While Congress passed an economic stimulus bill in March, suspending some student loan payments, bailing out hospitals and drug manufacturers, providing loans and tax credits to businesses that qualify, mailing $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans, and temporarily expanding unemployment benefits, Cole says the stimulus payments have been "incredibly insufficient," and the expanded unemployment benefits have already expired.

Congress remains deadlocked on another stimulus bill, with Republicans refusing to offer expanded unemployment benefits as generous as the those in the first bill, and Democrats wary of Republicans' plan to shield employers from lawsuits if their workers get sick.

The White House might be able to suspend payroll taxes or extend a lapsed moratorium on evictions by executive action, but another stimulus check is unlikely if Congress can't reach a deal.

"The suffering in what is the richest country in the history of the world is shocking," Cole said. "Every single other industrialized economy has responded more effectively to the virus. The city of Tokyo, with more than fourteen million people, has 271 deaths. By contrast, NYC has suffered 16,000 deaths with a similar population. It's an abomination!"

"Shockingly, after more than five months of knowledge about this pandemic, there still is NO national plan, leaving individual cities and states, individual people, and businesses to largely fend for themselves," he continued. "(Fifty) states with 50 plans rather than a single plan for a single nation. As a result, 100,000 people already are dead with several thousand more dying each day. The economy remains in freefall, the worst crisis since the early 1930s. It's a travesty on a scale we've not seen since Herbert Hoover's (and the Republican Party's) paltry, pathetic response to the Great Depression — doing almost nothing for 3+ years."