US weekly jobless claims fall

WASHINGTON - The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits declined further last week, while layoffs dropped to their lowest level in just more than 21 years in July as companies held on to their workers amid a labor shortage.

Claims largely moved sideways in July, with economists blaming California, which they said was stepping up efforts to clear its backlog of applications. That has helped to keep claims above their pre-pandemic level of 256,000, though they have dropped from a record 6.149 million in early April 2020. While economists do not expect large-scale business shutdowns as what happened early in the pandemic, there are worries that rising cases could slow the labor market recovery amid a shortage of workers. There were a record 9.2 million job openings as of the end of May. About 9.5 million people are officially unemployed.

"The elephant in the room is the Delta variant," said James McCann, deputy chief economist at Aberdeen Standard Investments in Boston. "It has not prompted major changes in public health restrictions yet but it could make some people nervous about going back to work, especially in those states in which vaccine hesitancy has held back progress.

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