Federal unemployment payments could be lifeline
Some Californians could see thousands of dollars in retroactive federal unemployment benefits under a plan announced by the U.S. Department of Labor to expand eligibility for people whose jobs were impacted by the pandemic.
Federal officials said Thursday that three groups of people would now be eligible for payments under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program, created early last year to cover lost wages for people who were knocked out of work by the pandemic and weren’t eligible for regular
“Until now, many workers have faced a devil’s bargain: risk coronavirus infection, or choose some level of safety and live without income support.”
Suzi Levine, U.S. Department of Labor official
state unemployment benefits.
The categories of workers who will see payments because of the shift: workers who stopped receiving regular unemployment benefits after refusing to work a job without sufficient protections against the virus, those laid off or who saw their hours reduced because of the pandemic, and some school employees whose paychecks have been slashed and aren’t guaranteed while schools remain shuttered.
“Until now, many workers have faced a devil’s bargain: risk coronavirus infection, or choose some level of safety and live without income support,” Suzi Levine, principal deputy assistant secretary of Labor for employment and training, said in a statement.
The policy could have less of an effect on workers in California, according to Michael Bernick, an attorney with the law firm Duane
Morris and a former director of the state’s Employment Development Department.
“Here in California since last May the EDD has taken the position that a worker who reasonably believes a workplace is unsafe can collect (state) unemployment insurance,” Bernick said.
The EDD did not immediately respond to emailed questions about the changes.
The Department of Labor said it did not know how many people would receive the payments but said they would be paid for out of the emergency CARES act passed early last year by Congress.
Payments will be retroactive to last February, depending on when someone lost their job, unless they filed their first PUA claim after Dec. 27. Those people would be limited to payments beginning on or after Dec. 6.
The announcement comes as states and the federal government continue to fight massive fraud and identity theft that resulted in weekly claims under the PUA program reaching the hundreds of thousands nationally, many of them made by criminals apparently siphoning billions of dollars in assistance from abroad.
The state’s EDD has taken steps to combat the fraud, including hiring the identity verification firm id.me. Last month the agency said more than a quarter of the more than $100 billion in unemployment payments that were supposed to have been made to Californians since the start of the pandemic may have been stolen.
A scathing report by the state auditor last month pointed out how the agency left itself open to massive theft and leaving many legitimate claimants struggling to get desperately needed assistance.
PUA claims in California dropped by more than 10,000 last week compared with the week before that, down to 22,445. That is the lowest number of claims statewide since the early days of the pandemic, indicating that antifraud steps taken by the state are having the intended effect, Bernick said.