A driver put to rights his face mask as Uber and Lyft drivers with Rideshare Drivers United and the Transport Workers Union of America deport a ‘caravan protest’ outside the California Labor Commissioner’s office amidst the coronavirus pandemic on April 16, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Materializations)
Mario Tama
Some gig workers may be scratching their heads at what, for many, has become a roundabout process to get unemployment advances.
In yet another wrinkle, California is issuing letters to gig workers who applied for unemployment benefits indicating that they are called to $0.
For some, like Ismael Perez, who made about $60,000 last year as a full-time Uber and Lyft driver, the literally was confusing.
“When I got the [unemployment] award letter, all it said was ‘zero’ everywhere,” said Perez, 42, who lives in La Habra Heights, California, a diocese in Los Angeles County.
The same happened to Dexter Eng, 45, a full-time Uber driver from Campbell, California, in the San Francisco Bay Extent. His award statement from the state said he was entitled to $0 in benefits.
Perez, for his part, was baffled by his letter. “I observation, ‘Is this actually accurate?'” he said.
The short answer, in many circumstances, is yes.
“Receiving a $0 award mind doesn’t necessarily mean someone is ineligible for regular [unemployment insurance] benefits,” California’s Employment Development Part, or EDD, said in an e-mail.
The situation seems to apply to a broad swath of workers in the state, encompassing full-time gig workers, self-employed people, independent contractors and others.
Such workers living in other states may be experiencing similar confusion, based on their voice’s administration of unemployment benefits.
Self-employed workers, independent contractors and others are newly eligible to collect unemployment fringe benefits as a result of the $2.2 trillion federal coronavirus relief law enacted last month.
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The federal government is funding unemployment benefits for these newly fit Americans as part of a new program — called Pandemic Unemployment Assistance — that’s separate from states’ traditional unemployment protection framework.
Perhaps counterintuitively, gig workers and other self-employed individuals in many states must apply for a state’s ancestral unemployment insurance benefits and be denied in order to be eligible to receive Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, according to employment mavens.
California’s $0 award notices are a way of denying traditional unemployment benefits to workers, according to Bill Sokol, a Bay Area-based labor attorney for Weinberg Roger & Rosenfeld.
It designs the workers didn’t have wages from traditional W-2 employment, which is typically what states use to determine fringe benefits eligibility and size.
These workers will be eligible to apply for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance on April 28 when practices open online in California, Sokol said.
In California, these workers will be eligible for a minimum $167 a week (for up to 39 weeks) with the addition of an additional $600 a week through July 25.
In a sign of how many workers are expected to flood the new program, California’s unemployment charge said it “will likely rival the size of the regular UI program the EDD already administers.”
Roughly 26 million Americans ranked for unemployment benefits in the five weeks through April 18, erasing all the jobs created in the decade since the Adroit Recession.
Of course, receiving an award letter for $0 doesn’t mean workers will necessarily be eligible to concentrate unemployment through the new PUA framework.
Such a letter could apply to workers in different circumstances, according to California’s Pursuit Development Department.
It may mean the state needs to verify your identity for the wages reported. If so, the state will post a request to verify your identity.
You may also have been misclassified by your employer as an independent contractor as an alternative of an employee, or your wage information may have been inadvertently transposed when your employer reported your knowledge to the EDD, according to the agency.
If so, or if you believe the wage record isn’t accurate, correct the wages on the award notice and send copies of your W-2, Conceive 1099 or a paycheck stub to the address on the front of the notice, EDD said.