California workers would see $400 extra in weekly unemployment benefits following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump — but to speed the money to the jobless amid coronavirus-linked economic woes, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday the state would have to cough up $700 million a week.
The state would have to reprogram a primitive EDD computer system that is already haunted by tech gremlins such as freezes and glitches as it reels from a tsunami of claims from workers who have lost their jobs due to business shutdowns ordered by the government to combat the deadly bug.
The president signed a series of executive orders in recent days that included a provision to add $400 a week to the normal state unemployment benefits, but the order also obliged states to pay $100 of that amount.
Gov. Newsom, however, said Monday during a regular news briefing to discuss the state’s response to the coronavirus that California is too impoverished to come up with the 25 percent share of the additional $400 payment.
“The state does not have an identified resource of $700 million a week that we haven’t already obliged,” Gov. Newsom said. “There is no money sitting in the piggy bank from the previous CARES act.”
The additional $400 would be a huge benefit for California workers who have lost their jobs. So far in 2020, the average weekly benefit in the state is $305. The maximum benefit is $450. That means the average benefit would be $705 a week and the maximum benefit would be $850 a week.
The governor emphasized that massive cuts would have to be made in other state programs to come up with the California share of the unemployment benefits.
“That would create a burden the likes of which a state even as large as California could not absorb,” Newsom said.
The governor also suggested that the EDD’s archaic computer system — currently based on a decades-old programming language called Cobol — might stagger beneath additional strains if it had to be reworked to accommodate a $400 payment.
“We would have to reprogram a system that is well-defined as hardly perfect at EDD,” Gov. Newsom said.
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Author: George Avalos