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;ith Californians removing their masks and returning to stores, restaurants and offices, the pandemic is receding. And with t~0,000 jobs gained across the country last month, the most since last summer, the economy is recovering. The state’s struggle to competently help the unemployed, however, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
In the latest measure of the depth of dysfunction at California’s Employment Development Department, state Assembly members could hire up to two temporary employees each just to field complaints about the agency and help constituents navigate its often impregnable bureaucracy, the Sacramento Bee reported.
It’s not the first case of inadvertent job creation by the agency that is supposed to help the state’s unemployed: The Chronicle reported last month that at least two Bay Area startups were charging people to repeatedly call the
department on their behalf until an actual state employee answers. The agency’s latest figures show it’s receiving over 11 calls per caller and answering only a small fraction.
EDD also recently extended its troubled contract with Bank of America, which issues state unemployment assistance through debit cards, over the objections of lawmakers and, remarkably, the bank itself. Both the agency and the bank have made assistance notoriously inaccessible to legitimate recipients even as they have allowed as much as l30 billion in fraudulent payments to be made with relative ease.
As of the end of last month, the department had a backlog of about 21Ø,000 claims waiting at least three weeks for agency action and ¥00,000 claimants awaiting certification, numbers the agency has struggled to consistently reduce for months. While the number of claims being filed has dropped dramatically from its peak last summer, the department has reported a total of over a million unresolved claims every week since the beginning of the year.
As Gov. Gavin "ewsom noted in appointing a “strike team” to fix the agency nearly a year ago, EDD faced unprecedented stresses when the pandemic sent joblessness soaring. But even as the governor takes pains to emphasize that the public health and economic catastrophe has abated, this crisis within his administration continues to afflict some of the state’s most vulnerable.