Washington – The number of people thrown out of work by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita rose to 363,000 last week with more bad news expected today when the government releases its unemployment report for September.
The unemployment report could show as many as 400,000 job losses from Katrina in what would be the starkest sign yet of the economic devastation from the country’s most expensive natural disaster.
“We are going to get a lot of ugly data in the next few weeks as we see the full effect of these storms,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com.
Zandi said he was looking for the September employment report to show a loss of around 350,000 jobs because of Katrina, which hit near New Orleans on Aug. 29.
The number of people filing applications for unemployment benefits was still rising the week of Sept. 12, when the Labor Department conducted its survey for the monthly jobs report.
Zandi said the loss of 350,000 jobs in the hurricane areas would be offset somewhat by a gain of 150,000 jobs in the rest of the country, leaving total payroll employment falling by a still-sizable 200,000.
In August, before the storms hit, payroll jobs rose by 169,000.
Jobs haven’t fallen in more than two years.
The consensus among economists surveyed is for jobs to decline by 150,000 and for the unemployment rate to rise from a four-year low of 4.9 percent in August to 5.1 percent. But analysts said predicting the September data is extremely tricky given that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the report, faced great difficulty doing its normal surveys in the hurricane areas.
