Mercury News
By George Avalos
Hundreds of thousands of California workers face a fresh round of delays of more than a month for their unemployment payments while a state labor agency attempts to launch a new federal program, officials said Wednesday.
The delays jolted a California workforce that has been battered for more than a year by government-ordered business shutdowns of varying degrees.
Potentially 800,000 California workers face delays through the end of April in receiving payments of unemployment benefits issued by the embattled state Employment Development Department. Since March 2020, the EDD has been buried in an avalanche of unemployment claims that it has struggled to pay on a timely basis. The results have been uneven at best.
Now a newly approved federal program that is issuing extra payments of $300 a week on top of a worker’s regular state unemployment benefits is contributing to the delay.