Unemployment skyrocketing, travel industry hit bad

We’ve just seen the new report for unemployment in this country and it is shocking. 

The initial jobless claims have spiked to a seasonally adjusted 3.28 million for the week ending March 21 according to statistics from the Department of Labor. This is lightyears ahead of the previous record of jobless claims since the Department of Labor began tracking this type of data back in the late 1960s.

Consider that the previous record was 695,000 claims and that was set in October 1982.

This new record is almost 5 times that of the old record and is also an exponential leap from the 282,000 claims that were reported in the prior week. 

Many of these lost jobs are coming from the travel industry.

The U.S. Travel Association revised its projection for how many jobs they expected to be lost in the travel industry from 4.6 million to 5.9 million and they predict that the loss of jobs in the travel industry alone would increase the unemployment rate from 3.5% 7.1%.

Also, the expected loss of $910 billion in travel-related economic output in 2020 would be seven times the impact of 9/11. Basically, even if every other industry was not impacted, the travel industry alone would be capable of driving the country into a recession.

One just has to wonder what will unfold over the next couple of weeks.

We know that a stimulus package is right on the horizon and that it is going to help a lot of people in the travel industry and also small businesses. Hopefully, this package will be easily executed over the next couple of weeks and we will see Americans not have to worry about losing their jobs and the travel industry will begin to course correct as much as it can at this stage.