Next week, roughly two million Californians will lose their enhanced unemployment benefits.
Congress enacted four programs in 2020 to cushion the loss of jobs due to the pandemic. California workers filed 59,755 initial claims for unemployment during the week that ended on Aug. 28, a decrease of 3,591 from the prior week, the U.S. Labor Department reported. But state labor departments tell CNBC Make It that they have no intention of extending or providing additional benefits on their own. Effectively, the coronavirus unemployment benefits are as good as gone.
That means an estimated 7.5 million will lose all of their unemployment benefits after next week, the left-leaning Century Foundation recently found, as programs that benefited gig and part-time workers, as well as the long-term unemployed, completely expire. Millions more will lose a significant amount of income as the $300 enhanced federal benefit lapses.
Those programs reportedly end on September 4th.