The Employment Development Department (EDD) is a disaster. Applying for unemployment benefits is confusing and slow. People who should qualify are being told that they don’t. You can’t fix something if you filled out the online forms wrong or the site crashes while you’re using it. You can’t call the office because nobody picks up.
People are frustrated and stressed out because they don’t have jobs, they don’t have paychecks, and they were told not to worry because the state would take care of them first, and the feds would take care of them second!
Meanwhile, Assemblymembers Jordan Cunningham (R-San Luis Obispo) and Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara) are fielding hundreds of phone calls from constituents to try and answer the questions that the EDD simply can’t.
“It never really operated well, even before this crisis,” Cunningham told the Sun.
Why does it take a crisis to figure out that something isn’t working right and needs to be fixed?
Kind of like a deadly accident at an intersection that’s needed stoplights for years. It takes a pandemic to put attention on the things that have been neglected for far too long because human beings are limited in their capacity to comprehend multiple things simultaneously.
So on one hand we have hundreds of people—probably thousands—on the Central Coast who aren’t receiving any benefits at all because the EDD is overwhelmed. And on the other, we have unemployed residents who are receiving their benefits from both the state and the federal government—and are now making more than they were while they were fully employed.
How does that make sense?
Why would you go back to work? Well, if you ask U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara), whose party pushed for the extra unemployment dollars, people will go back to work for the health care benefits, which can cost between $400 to $1,000 a month.
Umm, really? Maybe Carbajal’s bad at math.
Those benefits from the feds give an additional $600 per week to people who qualify for unemployment. If you’re making $2,200 more on unemployment than you were working, you still come out ahead if you just stay home.
But it’s also about employers, who are faced with making tough decisions about who to bring back for that very reason: Their employees will be taking a pay cut to come back to work.
Your People Professionals CEO Sandra Dickerson said the Paycheck Protection Program, which is geared to give businesses a leg up through the potential for federal loan forgiveness, makes things more complicated. Businesses that qualify for the loan and receive the money—which hasn’t happened in most cases—need to be staffed back to normal by June 30 to get forgiveness.
Even if the pandemic magically disappeared in the next month, will there be enough revenue coming in to sustain being fully staffed? The answer is probably no.
Carbajal said there’s no “black-and-white solution” to our economic and pandemic problems. True, but there is certainly a way to learn from rushed mistakes and fear of economic fallout—by seeing things as they are, not glossing over the sad parts for political expediency.
The canary is ready for a do-over. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 7-14, 2020.
