Not all eligible to get Trump’s $300 benefit
JACKSON, Mississippi — Down to a weekly unemployment check of $96, Fakisha Fenderson brushed aside her doctor’s advice last month and began looking for a job.
In mid-May, Fenderson’s employer, a door manufacturer, sent her home after a co-worker tested positive for the coronavirus. But the 22-year-old, who is six months pregnant and has asthma, felt desperate for work after a $600-a-week federal jobless benefit expired at the end of July.
She also doesn’t qualify for a $300-a-week check the Trump administration is now offering. That program, announced Aug. 8, requires the jobless get at least $100 in state benefits to qualify. “It would have been such a huge help,” said Fenderson, who has a 1-year old son and lives in Laurel, Mississippi. “It’s kind of crazy, and it doesn’t make sense.”
The administration rolled out the new $300-aweek benefit, using money from a $44 billion disaster relief fund, after Congress and the White House failed to agree to extend the $600 payment. It was initially announced as $400, but that included an additional $100 from state funds that almost no states are providing.
Yet because of restrictions and bureaucratic hurdles, more than 1 million of the unemployed won’t receive that $300 check, and their financial struggles will deepen. Many, like Fenderson, were low-paid workers whose state unemployment aid falls below the $100 weekly threshold. That stands to widen the inequalities that disproportionately hurt Black and Latino workers, who are more likely to work in low-wage jobs.
Some gig and contract workers won’t qualify, either. What’s more, the Trump administration’s program requires the unemployed to certify that their job loss stemmed from the coronavirus — a provision that could trip up many. And the disaster relief money that is funding the new benefit could run dry in coming weeks.
The rules to qualify for the new $300 federal check could undercut the administration’s efforts to aid the jobless at a time of high unemployment. Eliza Forsythe, an economist at the University of Illinois, calculates that about 6% of people receiving state unemployment aid — 840,000 Americans — won’t qualify for the $300 federal benefit because they earned too little before the pandemic. And that figure is likely an underestimate, Forsythe said, because it doesn’t include gig and contract workers.
The $300 benefit can be retroactive, so many states will pay it to people who were unemployed in early August. That could drain the available money by midSeptember.