Oregon said Monday it has finally begun paying $176 million in federal benefits the state has withheld from laid-off workers for eight months.
The so called “waiting week” benefits should go out to 246,000 Oregonians within the next three days, showing up on debit cards, direct deposit accounts or in checks. They’ll average $715 apiece, though the size of the payments will vary considerably.
Another 170,000 people will have to keep waiting for their payments, possibly until late January. It’s not clear how much money is coming their way.
The Oregon Employment Department says workers don’t need to do anything additional to receive their money. The payments will be equal to one week of benefits -- including the $600 federal bonus for people who had a waiting period from spring into late July, and a $300 bonus for those who had their waiting week from late July until early September.
“Oregonians have been patient with us, and we thank them,” said David Gerstenfeld, the department’s acting director, in a statement Monday.
The waiting week saga has been among the most painful in a succession of failings at the employment department this year. Oregon is the last state to pay out the federal waiting week money, which covers the first week people are out of work. Most other states paid the benefits many months ago.
Overwhelmed by a surge of claims in the early days of the pandemic last spring, the employment department was in disarray and defiantly refused to commit that it would ever pay Oregonians the federal money. Gov. Kate Brown reversed course under pressure from the state’s congressional delegation and later fired the department’s former director.
However, the department took months to adapt its obsolete computer systems to pay that money. The state faced a congressional end-of-year deadline to begin making the payments or else it risked forfeiting the federal money.
That risk has passed, the department indicated last week, but unemployed people on extended benefits programs and workers whose employers participated in the state’s Workshare program may have to wait up to two more months. The department said last week that those workers will receive their full benefits, even if the money doesn’t arrive until after the new year.
“We know some claimants still have to wait to receive their payments, and we want them to know that we’re working hard to get them their funds as quickly as possible,” Gerstenfeld said Monday.
Workers typically aren’t eligible for benefits the first week they’re out of that job. Congress funded a waiver for that first week as part of the coronavirus relief bill passed last March in order to speed the delivery of benefits during the worst days of the economic downturn. Oregon, though, was unable to delivery those benefits until now.
(Self-employed workers and contractors who received benefits this year through the new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program did not have a waiting week and won’t receive additional benefits now.)
“I’ll keep pressing the department to ensure it distributes every eligible waiting week check in a timely manner and resolves claims stuck in adjudication for thousands of Oregonians so they too can get the benefits they are entitled to,” U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said in a statement Monday. He was among those who pressed the employment department to pay the waiting week last spring and later led the call for reform at the agency.
On Wednesday, Wyden said he wants to see federal legislation to extend benefits for other workers into 2021.
Oregon’s jobless rate peaked at 14.9% in April. The labor market has improved considerably since then, with unemployment falling to 6.9% in April. But there are still 137,000 Oregonians out of work and with coronavirus infection rates at historic highs, the employment department said another 51,000 jobs are at risk as the state enters a two-week “freeze” designed to contain the outbreak.
Oregon has paid out more than $5.6 billion in jobless benefits during the pandemic, more in the last eight months than in the prior nine years combined. And though new claims are now processed promptly, tens of thousands of older claims remain unresolved.
The waiting week money is at last on its way but around 20,000 other Oregonians are waiting for their claims to be resolved through a bureaucratic process called adjudication. Some have been waiting for months. Tens of thousands of others may also be waiting for payments and might need their claims adjudicated.
Further, as many as 70,000 Oregonians may lose their jobless benefits altogether on the day after Christmas when an extended benefit program and the program for self-employed workers expire.
Note: The Oregonian furloughed its journalists for a week earlier in the pandemic. They, like other furloughed Oregonians, qualify for waiting week payments.
-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |