California expanding hours on unemployment phone lines after complaints about long delays
California’s beleaguered unemployment office will expand “very shortly” its staffed phone lines, which now are manned for just four hours a day, so they take calls from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
And, said Gov. Gavin Newsom, hundreds of employees have been assigned to help take the calls.
“Since 2013 our call center at EDD has gone from 8 a.m. to just noon. We’re now expanding those hours,” he told reporters. EDD is the Employment Development Department, which manages the unemployment program.
He’s directed the department to go at least until 5 p..m., but added, “We believe we have the capacity to go even further.”
Newly unemployed Californians with questions about benefits have complained they’ve been unable to reach EDD employees to answer questions about benefits.
Several told The Sacramento Bee that waits are routinely long and often can last for days — if they can ever get through. Instead, they get recordings and are directed to state websites, which they often find are difficult to navigate.
Newsom said Friday that new claimants should start to get benefits within three weeks of applying.
He said the state had “reprioritized” more than 550 employees just to focus on getting the money out.
“Our top priority has been on processing these claims,” he said. “We’re still within that prescribed period of time that we had before this crisis to get checks out, and that’s within 21 days.
“We still believe we can get those checks within that traditional timeline despite this unprecedented surge,” he said..
The agency has been overwhelmed over the last month after receiving claims from 2.5 million people. The department had been handling an average of about 41,000 claims per week before the coronavirus outbreak sent the economy into a tailspin.
Beneficiaries can get up to $450 a week in state benefits as well as $600 a week, through the end of July, from a new federal program. The $600 is expected to be added to checks beginning Sunday.
This story was originally published April 10, 2020 at 3:37 PM with the headline "California expanding hours on unemployment phone lines after complaints about long delays."
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