WASHINGTON — Ohio took in nearly twice as many new unemployment claims last week as the week before, in the same days that 1,341 truck workers in Springfield were due to lose their jobs, while the national figure the Labor Department leads with barely moved.
That figure was 199,000 seasonally adjusted initial claims for the week ending Oct. 10, up 1,000 from a revised 198,000, the department said in its Thursday release. It is the fifth straight week below 200,000, against 222,000 a year ago. The year’s lowest weeks were April 25 at 190,000 and July 18 at 189,000, the latter revised from the 187,000 that TEH reported as a 57-year low in weekly jobless claims.
The seasonal adjustment is built to absorb a rise like this one, and it did: unadjusted claims climbed 19,456, or 11.4 percent, to 190,626, against the 11.0 percent the seasonal factors expected. It cannot explain individual states. The state table shows Ohio going from 4,709 to 8,596, Tennessee from 2,350 to 5,834 and Pennsylvania from 7,473 to 9,332, with the department’s own warning that advance claims are not directly comparable with earlier weeks.
Ohio’s jump has a candidate cause. In a letter to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services dated July 27, International Motors told the state it expected to sell its Springfield Assembly Plant and Truck Specialty Center to Roshel on Oct. 2 and that “virtually all employees” there would be terminated that day, except those on certain types of leave. It counted about 1,314 workers at the plant and 27 at the specialty center, most of them represented by the United Auto Workers through Locals 402 and 658. Workers were told they “may qualify for unemployment benefits.”
The plant had run mostly on a contract that, International said in March, “will expire on September 30, 2026.” Roshel, a defense and commercial vehicle manufacturer, has told the company it plans to start new operations there “at some point in the future.” The letter gives no date or headcount for that restart, and TEH found no primary document confirming the sale closed on Oct. 2.
The arithmetic is loose. If all 1,341 filed that week, which the release cannot confirm, they would explain about a third of Ohio’s 3,887 increase, and the table does not sort claims by employer. Tennessee’s count rose 3,484, and TEH found no layoff of that size in the sources it checked. For scale, claims reached a four-month high of 225,000 for the week ending May 30.
How many of Springfield’s 1,341 are inside Ohio’s 8,596, and what sits behind Tennessee’s jump, are questions the federal table cannot answer, and neither state’s own count was available when this was written.
