California's unemployment rate soared to 15.5% in April as the nation's most populous state lost 2.3 million jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic that shuttered most businesses.
The state's unemployment rate increased more than 10 percentage points since March, the largest one-month rise since 1976, when the state began using its current formula to measure job losses, according to the latest figures released Friday by the California Employment Development Department.
April's grim toll broke the record set in March. And it shows, just one month after the pandemic took hold, that California had already surpassed the 12.3% unemployment rate it reached during the Great Recession a decade ago.
Still, those numbers only tell part of the story. The report is based on a survey conducted the week of April 12. Many more Californians have lost their jobs since then; 5.1 million people have filed for unemployment benefits since March, EDD reported.
The surge of claims has exhausted the state’s unemployment trust fund, forcing it to borrow billions of dollars from the federal government. With scores of out-of-work residents in California still awaiting relief, EDD Director Sharon Hilliard told state lawmakers at a hearing Thursday that the agency is preparing to hire an additional 1,800 people to handle the mounting claims. But she said to answer all of the department’s phone calls, it would need a staff of 28,000 full-time employees working from 12 hours a day, seven days a week.