Connecticut’s official unemployment rate has dropped to 6.1 percent, and that could be bad news for some people who need unemployment benefits. The state labor commissioner says the improvement brings Connecticut’s three-month average unemployment rate below an 8 percent threshold used by the federal government. That means Connecticut could lose federal funding for an extra seven weeks of pandemic unemployment assistance. Some economists say the official unemployment rate under-represents the portion of people who should be considered unemployed in the state. The actual unemployment rate is estimated at closer to 11 percent. Both the official unemployment rate and the estimate of the actual rate have been slowly improving in Connecticut since huge, sudden job losses when parts of the economy were shut down in the early days of the pandemic.
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