The state’s unemployment rate jumped to 14.1 percent last month, while almost 440,000 jobs were lost across Wisconsin.
Nearly 386,000 were in the private sector, and about 54,000 government jobs were cut in April.
State Department of Workforce Development Chief Economist Dennis Winters says the jobless rate is something Wisconsin hasn’t seen since the Great Depression in the early 1930s. He says it was around 25 percent at the highest point.
Winters says the rate didn’t reach 10 percent during the Great Recession, in the late 2000s.
Thirty-six percent of the lost jobs were in the leisure and hospitality industries.
In March, the state’s unemployment rate was 3.1 percent.
