Business

V.I. Dept. of Labor Has Received Over 4,000 Unemployment Applications With About 20,000 Expected As Coronavirus Fallout Hits Home

Buccaneer Hotel has laid off 179 of its employees, which is almost the entire workforce. Limetree Bay contractors continue to make redundant hundreds — including 222 from construction company Elite. On St. Thomas, the layoffs are even more pronounced, representing more than half of the over 4,000 unemployment applications that have been filed as of Thursday with the VI Department of Labor. And by the time the impact of the virus has truly been realized, over 20,000 Virgin Islanders will have filed unemployment applications because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the V.I. Department of Labor. To get a sense of how dire this projection is, the territory's entire workforce who are part of the Unemployment Insurance system is 32,000, though a large number of claimants will be individuals who are not part of the UI system, among them the self-employed, gig economy workers, and others whose quarterly wages don't qualify them for regular unemployment. In a wide-ranging interview w...