Tennessee, Georgia jobless claims rise as over 30 million Americans now unemployed

More than 3.8 million laid-off workers applied for unemployment benefits last week as the U.S. economy slid further into a crisis that is becoming the most devastating since the 1930s.

Roughly 30.3 million people have now filed for jobless aid in the six weeks since the coronavirus outbreak began, forcing millions of employers to close their doors and slash their workforces. That is more people than live in the New York and Chicago metropolitan areas combined, and it’s by far the worst string of layoffs on record. It adds up to more than one in six American workers.

In Tennessee, another 43,792 workers filed initial claims for jobless benefits last week, including 5,018 workers in the 10-county region surrounding Chattanooga in Southeast Tennessee. That boosted the number of people with such claims to 368,336 Tennesseans, or 10% of those on the job at the start of March, and more claims are still being processed.

In Georgia, which a new study said has been one of the hardest-hit states, the state processed 247,003 initial claims. In the past month, the Georgia Department of Labor said it has processed nearly 1.1 million claims, more than the combined total for the previous three years.