WASHINGTON – The number of workers filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits fell last week after rising sharply the week before, according to the weekly report issued today by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration.

Initial claims for jobless benefits dipped by 4,000 filings, or 0.83 percent, to a seasonally adjusted 481,000 filings in the week ended Nov. 1, after rising 6,000 to a revised 485,000 new claims in the week ended Oct. 25 and holding steady at a revised 479,000 in the week ended Oct. 18. (READ MORE) Compared with the 324,000 initial claims registered in the same week of 2007, however, new unemployment filings rose 48.46 percent.

Analysts had expected the administration would report 477,000 new jobless claims last week – down from the initial federal estimate of 479,000 claims filed in the week ended Oct. 25 – based on the median forecast from a Bloomberg News survey of 39 economists. (Their estimates of new claims in the week ended Nov. 1 ranged from 460,000 to 491,000.)

By comparison, new claims so far this year have averaged 398,000, per week, an increase of 23.99 percent from the 321,000 per week reported for all of 2007.

Meanwhile, the total number of people collecting jobless benefits nationwide rose to what Bloomberg analysts called the highest level since February 1983. In the week ended Oct. 25 – the most recent for which such estimates are available – the ranks of the insured unemployed expanded to 3.843 million from the preceding week’s revised 3.721 million and the year-ago 2.590 million, the ETA said.

The insured unemployment rate – the share of the U.S. work force receiving unemployment benefits – edged up to 2.9 percent in the week ended Oct. 25 from 2.8 percent the week ended Oct. 18, the ETA said. But it was 45-percent higher than the year-ago rate of 2.0 percent.

“The underlying trend in claims is rising, and we’ll see confirmation tomorrow that the job market is deteriorating rapidly,” Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Mass., told Bloomberg News. He was referring to the nationwide Employment Situation Report, due tomorrow morning from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Consumer spending will continue to fall sharply,” Gault predicted. “This recession will be substantially deeper than the last two.”

A decrease was seen, however, in the number of people receiving extended unemployment benefits under two programs: In the week ended Oct. 18, the number of people claiming benefits under the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act (EUC) declined by 205,093 people, or 20.97 percent, to 773,049, from 978,142 the week ended Oct. 11 and 1.095 million the week before that, ETA figures show. And the number of people receiving extended jobless benefits under state guidelines in Alaska and Rhode Island fell by 424, or 38.58 percent, to 675 job-seekers from 1,099 in the week ended Oct. 11 and 1,236 the week ended Oct. 4.

And for the second week in a row, the Ocean State – which had an overall September jobless rate of 8.8 percent, the nation’s highest (READ MORE) – was not among the 10 states with the week’s highest insured unemployment rates, the report showed. That sparked hopes the Ocean State economy might be rebounding from what University of Rhode Island economist Leonard Lardaro has called its “nightmare” low. (READ MORE)

The nation’s highest insured unemployment rate was in Oregon and the Virgin Islands (3.6 percent); followed by Michigan and Nevada (3.5 percent); California and longtime No. 1 Puerto Rico (3.4 percent); South Carolina (3.3); and Arkansas, New Jersey (3.2) and Pennsylvania (3.2).

Additional information, including the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, is available from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration at www.dol.gov.