Here are three charts presentinginitial claims for unemployment insurance reported by Washington state’s Employment Security Department (ESD) by sector for the period from March 1 to May 16.

A note of caution about these numbers: In recent weeks, Washington’s unemployment insurance system has been hit by a rash of fraudulent claims (press releases here and (here). As a result, the unemployment insurance claims data released weekly by ESD overstate the number of individuals who have truly lost their jobs. The degree of overstatement is unknown at the present time. Whether the degree of overstatement varies across sectors is also unknown.

The first chart shows the number of claims by sector.

The five sectors with the greatest number of claims are, in descending order, accommodation and food services; health services and social assistance; retail trade; construction; and manufacturing. Together these five sectors accounted for sixty-two percent of the jobs lost.

The second chart shows initial claims sector as a proportion of the sector’s employment in the month of February.

The total number of private sector claims from March 1 to May 16 is equal to 31.5 percent of February private sector employment. The education services sector has experienced the greatest total number of claims relative to February employment (71.3%), followed by the arts, entertainment and recreation (70.4%), construction (48.5%), and accommodation and food services (47.7%) sectors. For the third week in a row, education services is the sector with the greatest weekly number of claims as a share of February employment.

The third chart is a scatter plot with claims as a share of February employment measured along the vertical axis and the sectors’ average weekly wages in 2018 (the most recent year for which average wages are available) is measured along the horizontal axis.

Low wage sectors have had relatively more layoffs than high wage sectors. The correlation coefficient between claims as a share of employment and average wage is −.543.