California workers will be able to receive an additional $300 in unemployment benefits amid the coronavirus after the state government agreed to participate in a lost wages program made possible through an executive order signed by President Donald Trump.
The U.S. government’s Lost Wages Assistance Program is tapping Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to bankroll the program, which replaces a prior program for coronavirus-linked federal unemployment assistance that provided $600 in extra weekly benefits for jobless workers.
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved the state’s application and will provide an initial amount of $4.5 billion, with the possibility of additional funding going forward,” the EDD stated in a post on its website.
Gov. Gavin Newsom had initially cast doubt that California would be able to participate in the new program, claiming the state couldn’t afford to cough up $700 million a week to participate in a federal program that would provide an additional $400 a week for workers who lost their jobs.
Now, however, the state EDD is participating in the program in a fashion that would enable workers to receive an additional $300 a week on top of their regular state unemployment benefits, a welcome relief to workers who have lost their jobs in California due to coronavirus-linked business lockdowns.
It might require a few weeks for the EDD to reformat its archaic computer systems to add the extra $300 payment.
This means that a worker with the maximum state payment of $450 a week could receive $750 a week. The worker receiving the average EDD payment of $287, as of June, could receive a weekly payment of $587.
Since state and local government agencies began to impose an array of business shutdowns in a quest to combat the deadly bug, a head-spinning 7.7 million California workers have filed first-time claims for unemployment benefits.
The EDD is mired in a mammoth backlog to pay jobless workers, a problem unleashed by the state agency’s broken call center and glitch-hobbled computer system that is based on a primitive programming language that is at least 30 years old.
The embattled state agency has failed to provide firm estimates about the size of the backlog and precisely when it will catch up to the unpaid claims that require a response.
An estimated 1.13 million California workers might be due money from the EDD but are instead stuck in the state agency’s bureaucratic limbo.
The EDD has only said that it hopes to catch up with payments to 239,000 workers whose claims are “awaiting EDD response.”
Another 889,000 workers could potentially be owed payments by the EDD, but the state agency is demanding that the workers provide further information before the claims can be processed.
“We can’t approve these claims at this time,” EDD spokesperson Loree Levy said in early August, referring to the 889,000 workers.
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August 25, 2020 at 02:08AM
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