SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California's unemployment rate in April was much higher than previously thought.
State officials announced last month the state's jobless rate in April was 15.5%. But Friday, the Employment Development Department (EDD) said the rate actually was 16.4%.
It's a remarkable revision that represents the state's unprecedented job losses because of the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, May's unemployment rate fell slightly to 16.3% as the state added 141.600 jobs last month.
California's unemployment rate remains far higher than the 12.3% rate the state hit at the height of the Great Recession a decade ago. Overall, the state has lost more than 2 million jobs since the coronavirus struck.
Nationwide, about 1.5 million laid-off workers applied for unemployment benefits last week, a historically high number, even as the economy increasingly reopens and employers bring some people back to work.
The latest figure from the Labor Department marked the 11th straight weekly decline in applications since they peaked at nearly 7 million in March as the coronavirus shut down much of the economy and caused tens of millions of layoffs. The decline was much smaller, though, than in recent weeks, falling just 58,000.
Read more from ABC10
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