On Thursday, as it does every week, the U.S. Department of Labor reported the number of unemployment claims in the United States in the week previous. That report revealed that a staggering 3.28 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance the week of March 16, a number that would have been inconceivable just weeks ago.

The New York Times published a graph of weekly unemployment claims going back twenty years that reveals both the scale of unemployment rate in the United States and how abruptly we arrived here. Before March, unemployment in this country peaked toward the end of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. During that recession, jobless claims climbed week-over-week for more than a year. More than 26 million people would eventually claim unemployment benefits at some point during the recession, but the weekly total during those years averaged “only” 345,000. By comparison, almost ten times that number lost their jobs in a single week as the need for self-imposed quarantines and social distancing ground the economy to a halt.

And yet analysts warn that that number, stunning as it is, almost certainly underreports the true number of people who lost work. Several state systems for filing unemployment buckled under pressure from a volume of filings for which they were not designed. The numbers also fail to account for contractors, gig-economy workers, and people who are self-employed, many of whom are ineligible for traditional unemployment benefits. And it fails to include those workers fortunate enough to stay in their jobs, but who saw their hours cut, their salaries reduced, or their benefits suspended for the foreseeable future.

The next monthly jobs report will come out on April 3^rd, but even that will likely underreport the scope of the problem, as it will include jobless claims aggregated from the first weeks of March, before most of the recent job losses occurred. We will have to wait until the May report on the April numbers before we truly understand the scale of the problem as it is today.

What we do know is that that the travel industry was among the first sectors to be impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic and that workers in this industry will be disproportionately represented in those jobless claims. Hotels, restaurants, airlines, travel companies, event venues, and other businesses in the industry had little or no opportunity to prepare for the all-but-complete shutdown of travel and tourism in this country and around the world. Many have had no choice but to shed staff as they struggle to remain solvent as they are forced to scale back operations or close their doors entirely for weeks, perhaps longer, to help prevent the further spread of the virus. A U.S. Travel Association/Tourism Economics report published on March 24 predicts that travel industry losses will far exceed that of any other sector. It projects that the travel industry will lose 4.7 million jobs in the second quarter in the United States alone. 

We applaud the bipartisan legislation that was signed into law last week providing hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency financing to small businesses struggling to make payroll, directing cash assistance to all Americans earning under $99,000 a year, and providing $600 a week to those who have lost their jobs during this crisis. Time will tell whether it goes far enough to prop up business and provide a lifeline to workers through this crisis.

As shocking as last week’s unemployment filing was, this week’s will almost certainly be worse. And the following week may well be worse still. Public health experts warn us that the worst of the medical crisis may still be weeks away. We must be prepared for more dark days to come in our industry.