More than 2million Californians have filed for unemployment benefits; early year boon in home sales expected to give way as virus stalls sales.
Newsom: 2.3 million have filed claims; number expected to grow
More than 2 million Californians have recently filed for jobless benefits, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday, and state officials are scrambling to get newly out-of-work residents the larger unemployment benefits enabled by the federal CARES Act to ease coronavirus-spawned economic devastation.
Gov. Newsom estimated at a news briefing on Tuesday that about 2.3 million people have filed claims for unemployment insurance, a grim assessment that is likely only to intensify pressure to begin the larger payments for jobless benefits. In his prior estimates for the avalanche of jobless claims, the governor has used March 12 as the starting point for the running totals, which are based on daily tracking by state labor officials.
The federal CARES legislation included a provision that added $600 in unemployment payments, paid by the federal government, to whatever jobless benefits state agencies would typically pay to people who were out of work, but it isn’t clear when those additional benefits would be received by those who lost jobs.
Just last week, California Labor Secretary Julie Su appeared during one of the governor’s news briefings to provide assurances that the additional cash would be deployed in short order. “We are gearing up to get those payments out,” Su said. She gave this week as the time frame for issuing the $600 in additional payments.
However, it appears deliveries of those payments were still being worked on, according to the state’s Employment Development Department.
“The EDD is still sorting through the latest details received late Sunday about the additional $600 payments to be paid for by the fed
eral government on top of the weekly state unemployment benefits claimants are receiving now,” EDD officials said in an email to this news organization.
It appears unemployed workers could receive as much as $1,050 a week when the largest state EDD benefits are combined with the enhanced federal payments.
“A worker who receives a maximum weekly benefit payment of $450 here in California would collect an additional $600 on top of that,” Loree Levy, the EDD’s deputy director of public affairs, said in an email. “The average weekly benefit payment in February here in California is $340.”
That means the average payment would be in the range of $940 a week. The $340 weekly unemployment benefit figure is based on the most recent estimates that are available for California.
The latest time frame for distribution of the enhanced $600 weekly payments was still unknown. It’s possible the EDD is struggling to meet the typical time period to process a jobless claim.
“The old three-week framework” is the EDD’s goal, Gov. Newsom said. The governor added, “We all have to do more and to do better.”