Despite widespread business shutdowns and cutbacks during the coronavirus pandemic, California’s battered job market showed signs of improvement with a decrease in first-time claims for unemployment, federal labor officials reported Thursday.
An estimated 267,100 California workers filed initial claims for jobless benefits last week, down about 10,000 from the week before, according to a new report by the U.S. Labor Department.
The decrease in claims filed in California over two consecutive weeks marked the first time that’s happened in about two months.
Yet it appears that California’s job woes are far from over.
“While some new hiring continues in California, the job losses have not stopped,” said Michael Bernick, a Milken Institute fellow and a former director of the state’s Employment Development Department.
In the United States, slightly more than 1.31 million workers filed first-time unemployment claims for the week ending on July 4, down roughly 99,000 from the approximately 1.41 million who filed initial jobless claims for the prior week.
The California improvement in unemployment claims marked the second consecutive week that those totals decreased. The last time that happened was during the week that ended on May 9.
Over the most recent four weeks that ended on July 4, California initial unemployment claims have averaged 267,600. That was up about 2,800 from the weekly average of 264,800 for the four weeks that ended on June 27. The four-week moving average is a way to smooth out the often sharp weekly fluctuations in jobless claims.
The slight rise in California claims averaged out over four weeks was triggered by a sharp spike during the week of June 20 when claims jumped by 43,100 and totaled 284,500. At the time, that marked the highest level for California jobless claims since April 25.
The weekly average for unemployment claims in the United States totaled 1.44 million for the four weeks that ended on July 4, down 63,000 from the average of 1.5 million for the four weeks that ended on June 27.
To be sure, the current levels for unemployment claims are far below the peak for California jobless claims of 1.06 million for the week that ended on March 28 and the 919,000 during the week that ended on April 4.
The current pace of jobless claims is 75 percent below the pinnacle for California unemployment in late March.
However, the latest week’s initial unemployment claims are six times greater than the weekly average of 45,000 claims that occurred during January and February of this year. Those were the two months that preceded the start of business shutdowns to combat the coronavirus that state and local government agencies ordered.
The stubbornly high levels of unemployment filings in California have occurred at a time when a huge number of workers are unable to process jobless claims with the EDD.
In response, The EDD has launched what it calls a “mass hiring effort” to bring aboard 5,300 workers in a quest to whittle down the mountain of unpaid jobless claims.
“Since May, the EDD has hired or made conditional job offers to more than 4,300 Californians out of a targeted total of 5,300 to assist with all aspects of the unemployment insurance program, hundreds of whom have completed training and are on the phones lines or processing claims,” the EDD said Thursday.
Jobless workers are having trouble getting through to the EDD due to a combination of a broken call center at the EDD and a computer system that’s hobbled with glitches.
“There is a lot of confusion and miscommunication at the EDD,” said Armond Domalewski, a workforce development expert who helped to create a Facebook group to address problems with claims processing at the embattled state labor agency. “The EDD is overwhelmed and you can’t get anybody on the phone.”
Liz Gardner, a Palo Alto resident, recently began to receive her first payments — but that was only after about two months of attempting to reach the EDD by paper mail, email, fax machine, phone calls, and the sluggish website.
“It was hellish, very troubling,” Gardner said.
Even in the scattered instances of people being able to reach a live person at the EDD, those efforts often end in frustration.
“The website doesn’t work, you can’t get through on the phone,” said Rhonda Dias, a San Jose resident and daycare teacher. “I finally reached somebody who said they would call back within 10 days. But I never heard back from anyone.”
