State begins pause for jobless claims

California halts unemployment claims while besieged EDD whittles down mammoth backlog

Ca lifor nia is par tway through a deliberate pause in processing an avalanche of unemployment claims that poured into the embattled state labor agency amid coronavirus-linked business shutdowns, which has stymied efforts to precisely track the number of weekly jobless filings in the Golden State.

The state Employment Development Department decided to pause unemployment claims processing in hopes that it can catch up on a claims backlog that has mushroomed due to the EDD’s months of failure to process jobless filings in anything close to a timely manner.

The EDD’s decision also forced the U.S. Labor Department to arbitrarily use the prior week’s number of jobless filings to ensure that the national unemployment claims don’t g yrate wildly, first sharply down during the California processing pause, then eventually sharply higher once the state resumed the processing of claims.

“Upon completion of the pause and the post- pause processing, the state will submit revised reports to reflect claims in the week during which they were filed,” the U.S. Labor Department stated in a note on Thursday.

The duration of the “postpause processing” referenced by the federal agency wasn’t immediately clear.

As a result, the official estimate for unemployment claims in California for the week that ended on Sept. 26

was 226,179, unchanged from the week that ended on Sept. 19.

“Sunday, Sept. 20, was the first day EDD stopped accepting new unemployment benefit claims as part of the department’s nearly two-week pause of new claims,” EDD spokesperson Barry White said in a previous email to this news organization.