A $ 600 per week lifeline is about to run out of rope, threatening to leave millions of American families at the end of theirs.
The pandemic unemployment assistance payments, which were approved in March as part of the government’s fiscal stimulus package, known as the CARES Act, will expire on July 31. For administrative reasons, the states have said that the last payments will come out this weekend if the program is not extended. Lawmakers are currently debating whether to extend the benefit, and some argue that the size of the payments removes the incentive to work. Others say the benefit has been an economic lifeline for millions of people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
Sarah is a single mother from rural Texas who asked that her last name be hidden so her children are not ashamed that others know they depend on government help. Earlier this year, he quit his job at a densely packed call center when the employer and coworkers refused to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s standard guidelines for masks and social distancing, he told NBC News.
“When it became clear that it would be ‘business as always’ in the call center and many of the management team were convinced that it was all a hoax or an exaggeration, I left,” said Sarah. Since then, one of her former colleagues has tested positive.
“As much as I need to go back to work after the additional $ 600 stops, I won’t risk my family,” Sarah told NBC News.
Now he’s struggling to put food on the table and make the rent, and he doesn’t know how he will manage when funds run out for additional assistance from the federal emergency program. The local food bank only delivers small bags of bakery items, which are not enough to feed four children from elementary to high school.
This month, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission revoked her SNAP food benefits after she earned $ 3 above the income limit, because her ex-husband had suddenly paid an outdated alimony.
When Sarah contacted the agency, she received conflicting advice and was told that it could take more than two months to resolve her problem. After being contacted by NBC News, a spokesperson for the agency agreed that they reviewed her case and found that she had exceeded the income limits set by the federal government for SNAP, but now they have contacted her to inform her that she will be eligible again in August. .
Government benefit programs “have failed the most vulnerable of us all, the American working-class family,” Sarah said.
According to an analysis by The Century Foundation, an estimated 25 million Americans have benefited from the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation. The program provides additional emergency income in addition to an employee’s regular unemployment benefits, which set about 50 percent of a person’s previous income.
The program has been criticized for being too generous with some workers for giving them more money than they earned before the pandemic. But the technical constraints on the historically underfunded state unemployment infrastructure required a one-size-fits-all approach to deliver assistance as quickly and comprehensively as possible.
Many of the state’s outdated unemployment systems, some programmed in COBOL’s outdated programming language, were unable to handle adjustment payments based on a percent replacement of lost wages, said Chad Stone, chief economist at the Center for Budget Priorities. and Politics, a leftist research and defense institute.
That required a flat rate that would function as income replacement to meet the needs of the largest number of workers and their ability to keep paying their bills and buying.
A $ 600 compensation was designed to offset the difference between the $ 980 average weekly earnings of employees on private payrolls in March and the $ 380 average amount of weekly unemployment insurance benefits.
There is consensus that Washington agrees that federal unemployment assistance should be continued, but there are differences on how it should be structured.
“Pandemic unemployment assistance is about to expire and we must respond to that,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC in an interview Thursday morning. “We will not pay people more to stay home than to work, but people who cannot find work will get approximately 70 percent salary replacement.”
There are no details on how this would be achieved through the current system. Either way, it may be weeks before payments resume, as state unemployment offices, especially those with older systems, will require time to reprogram their computers.
The need to continue the $ 600 was further highlighted Thursday, after the Labor Department reported that more than 1.4 million workers filed new claims for state unemployment benefits last week. It is the first time in nearly four months that weekly unemployment claims have increased, and marks the 18th consecutive week that more than 1 million Americans have applied for unemployment aid.
Tabitha Griffin, a single mother in Florida, had to close her cleaning business when the pandemic occurred. For now, she lives in a reduced-rate hotel room, along with her seven-year-old daughter. If she can’t afford that, she and her daughter will have to sleep in their car, she told NBC News.
She applied for federal pandemic unemployment assistance benefits, but accidentally entered one of her bank account digits incorrectly. She fixed it and pleaded with the Department of Economic Opportunity, the state unemployment agency, to reissue her salary, without success.
When your payment arrives, you say you will have enough to find a long-term rental.
His attempts to contact the agency went nowhere. After being contacted by NBC News, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity said it would investigate the matter.
“Having a child and feeling like you’re failing him is the worst thing I’ve ever felt,” Griffin said.
The situation is especially critical for some unemployed workers who have relied on federal assistance to cover their out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Amy Leyendecker is a 46-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes who lives in New Mexico. She needs daily doses of insulin to avoid entering a life-threatening coma. In 2018, she lost a foot to the amputation after trying to ration her insulin to stretch her. With a note from her doctor, she declared unemployed in March for her part-time cashier job after her employers encouraged anyone who didn’t feel safe working during the pandemic. Since then, the $ 600 a week has allowed her to cover her monthly medical costs.
“We don’t know how long this will last, so I don’t know month after month if I can afford to live. This month, I am good unlike many others. Next month? I think we’ll see, “said Leyendecker.
