WASHINGTON (AP) — More Americans applied for jobless benefits last week as the number of unemployed continues to rise modestly, though the labor market remains one of the strongest parts of the U.S. economy.

Applications for jobless aid for the week ending July 30 rose by 6,000 to 260,000 from the previous week’s 254,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. First-time applications generally reflect layoffs.

The four-week average for claims, which evens out the weekly ups and downs, also rose from the previous week, to 254,750.

The total number of Americans collecting jobless benefits for the week ending July 23 rose by 48,000 from the previous week, to 1,416,000. That figure has been near 50-year lows for months.

On Tuesday, the Labor Department reported that American employers posted fewer job openings in June as the economy contends with persistently high inflation and rising interest rates.

Job openings fell to a still-high 10.7 million in June from 11.3 million in May. Job openings, which never exceeded 8 million in a month before last year, had topped 11 million every month from December through May before dipping in June.

The Labor Department’s jobs report for July, due out Friday, is expected to show that employers tacked on another 250,000 jobs last month, which would be a healthy number in normal times but would be the lowest since December 2020, when the global economy was being ravaged by the pandemic.

Economists expect the unemployment rate to hold at 3.6% for the fifth straight month.

Though the labor market is still considered strong, there have been some high-profile layoffs announced recently by Tesla, Netflix, Carvana, Redfin and Coinbase. A host of other companies, particularly in the tech sector, have announced hiring freezes.

Other indicators point to some weakness in the U.S. economy. The government said last week that the U.S. economy shrank 0.9% in the second quarter, the second straight quarterly contraction.

Consumer prices are still soaring, up 9.1% in June compared with a year earlier, the biggest yearly increase in four decades. In response, the Federal Reserve raised its main borrowing rate by another three-quarters of a point last week. That follows June’s three-quarter point hike and another half-point increase in May.

Higher rates have already sent home sales tumbling, made the prospect of buying a new car more burdensome and pushed credit card rates up.

All of those factors paint a divergent and confusing picture of the post-pandemic economy: Inflation is hammering household budgets, forcing consumers to pull back on spending, and growth is weakening, heightening fears the economy could fall into recession.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose to the highest level in three months as the fast-spreading omicron variant continued to disrupt the job market.

Jobless claims rose for the third straight week — by 55,000 to 286,000, highest since mid-October, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The jump in claims marked the biggest one-week increase since mid-July.

The four-week average of claims, which smooths out weekly volatility, rose by 20,000 to 231,000, highest since late November. Economists said that last week’s claims may have been inflated by the Labor Department’s attempts to tweak the numbers to account for seasonal variations; unadjusted, applications fell last week by more than 83,000.

“We could see one more week of notably higher claims before they should top out,″ analysts with Contingent Macro Advisors predicted. “This bears close watching going forward.″

The Federal Reserve might reconsider plans to ease its massive support for the economy if claims stay above 250,000 as the Fed’s March policy meeting approaches, Contingent said.

While the fast-moving omicron variant may cause less severe disease on average, COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are climbing and modelers forecast 50,000 to 300,000 more Americans could die by the time the wave subsides in mid-March.

The seven-day rolling average for daily new COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. has been trending upward since mid-November, reaching nearly 1,800 on Jan. 19 — still below the peak of 3,300 in January 2021.

A surge in COVID-19 cases has set back what had been a strong comeback from last year’s short but devastating coronavirus recession. Jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, had fallen mostly steadily for about a year and late last year dipped below the pre-pandemic average of around 220,000 a week.

Altogether, 1.6 million people were collecting jobless aid the week that ended Jan. 8.

Companies are hanging on to workers they have at a time when it’s difficult to find replacements. Employers posted 10.6 million job openings in November, the fifth-highest monthly total in records going back to 2000. A record 4.5 million workers quit their jobs in November — a sign that they are confident enough to look something better.

The job market has bounced back from last year’s brief but intense coronavirus recession. When COVID-19 hit, governments ordered lockdowns, consumers stayed at home and many businesses closed or cut back hours. Employers slashed millions of jobs in March and April 2020, and the unemployment rate rocketed to 14.7%.

But massive government spending — and eventually the rollout of vaccines — brought the economy back. Last year, employers added a record 6.4 million jobs — but that still was not enough to make up for the unprecedented 9.4 million jobs lost in 2020. And hiring slowed in November and December last year as employers struggled to fill job openings.

Still, the unemployment rate fell last month to a pandemic low 3.9%.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell slightly last week to 793,000, evidence that job cuts remain high despite a substantial decline in new confirmed viral infections.

Last week’s total declined from 812,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That figure was revised higher from the previously reported 779,000. The numbers point to a still-elevated number of layoffs. Before the virus erupted in the United States in March, weekly applications for jobless aid had never topped 700,000, even during the Great Recession.

The job market had shown tentative improvement last summer but then slowed through the fall and in the past two months has essentially stalled. In December and January combined, employers cut 178,000 jobs. Nearly 10 million jobs remain lost to the pandemic.

Thursday’s government report also showed a sizable rise in the total number of Americans who are receiving jobless aid, including through extended benefit programs — a sign that long-term unemployment may be growing. All told, 20.4 million people were receiving benefits in the week that ended Jan. 23, the latest period for which data are available. That’s up sharply from 17.8 million from the week before. Part of that increase likely reflects the processing of a rush of claims after the extension of two federal aid programs just after Christmas.

In January, the unemployment rate fell to 6.3% from 6.7%, mostly because more people found jobs. But it also declined because many people who had lost jobs stopped looking for one. The government doesn’t count people as unemployed unless they’re actively seeking work.

The job market’s persistent weakness is fueling President Joe Biden’s push for a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package. Biden’s proposal would extend, through August, two federal unemployment benefit programs that are set to expire in mid-March. His proposal would also raise the federal unemployment benefit to $400 a week from the current $300.

Some economists, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, have raised concerns that such a huge spending package would risk igniting inflation by fueling a burst of consumer spending later this year as the virus is gradually brought under control.

Yet on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell underscored the Fed’s focus on the struggling job market and said he thought that any worrisome surge in inflation would be unlikely. If it did arise, Powell said, the Fed has the financial tools it needs to quell inflation. For now, inflation remains below the Fed’s target rate.

“We are still very far from a strong labor market whose benefits are broadly shared,” Powell said.

A driving force behind the Biden administration’s push for more aid is the impending expiration of the extended jobless benefits in barely more than a month. More than 11 million people would lose benefits as a result, according to a report by the Century Foundation. Unlike the previous expiration of extended unemployment aid, which occurred on Dec. 26, the cut-off would be phased in between March 14 and April 11.

The job market won’t likely be close to fully recovered by then. Many economists expect a burst of growth and hiring later this year after vaccines are more widely administered, especially if Congress provides significantly more aid to households, small businesses and states and cities. But that isn’t likely for many months.

Once vaccinations become more widely distributed and administered in the coming months, economists expect growth and hiring to pick up, particularly if Congress provides significantly more financial aid to households, small businesses and states and cities.

“Additional fiscal stimulus and broader vaccine diffusion will eventually allow the labor market to heal,” Oxford Economics said in a note Thursday. “But as the January employment data showed, current conditions are still quite weak and declines in new jobless claims are likely to occur only gradually in the near term.”

Research issued Thursday by the JPMorgan Chase Institute found that supplemental unemployment payments, like the $600 a week that the federal government provided from April through July, helped maintain spending for the unemployed and didn’t appear to reduce their willingness to take jobs.

More than half the recipients who received the extra $600 returned to work before the benefit had expired, the study found. And the likelihood of recipients finding a job didn’t increase when the aid did expire. The report estimates that every dollar of additional benefits boosted spending by unemployed families by between 29 and 43 cents.

About 4 million people who are out of work have stopped searching for jobs and so aren’t even counted as unemployed. Powell said that if these people were counted among the officially jobless, the unemployment rate would be nearly 10%.

In his remarks to the Economic Club of New York, the Fed chair also highlighted the uneven nature of the layoffs in this pandemic. Job losses among the highest-earning one-quarter of Americans have been just 4%, while job losses among the poorest one-quarter have been “a staggering 17%,” Powell said.

Layoffs have also fallen disproportionately on Black workers. In December, 18% of people who sought unemployment aid were black, even though African Americans make up 13.5% of the workforce, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. By contrast, nearly 50% of the applicants were white, even though 77% of workers are white.

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