Jobless claims drop, record quirk cited

Jobless claims paid in Iowa were down in November from October. But before we celebrate, Iowa Workforce analyst Gary Wilson says a bookkeeping quirk explains that one-point-one-million-dollar drop from October.Most claims of any week are logged on the Wednesday, and there were five Wednesdays in October, only four in November. Wilson says with that aside, there were no big upheavals in the jobless benefit figure paid Iowans in November. Discount that, and he says there were some layoffs at Thanksgiving as plants laid off people and closed, to cut their inventories. Wilson says there were about seven thousand more Iowans per week receiving unemployment benefits this year than the previous year, a figure that’s held fairly steady throughout 2001. Before September eleventh the jobless payments totaled one-an d-a-half million dollars a week higher than they’d been the previous year, and after the disaster the payments were higher than a year earlier by about two million. Again, Wilson says a lot of the autumn jobless increase came in workers whose layoffs had been announced by Iowa manufacturers earlier in the year, and simply took place in the fourth quarter.