As Erin Madden opened it and pulled out the debit card with her unemployment benefits on it, all she could think about was the half a year she’d waited for this moment. She had come to feel it would never happen.
“I almost didn’t believe that it had finally arrived,” Madden, 28, said.
But there was the card, which would soon have more than $16,000 on it.
When the pandemic halted American life in mid-March, Madden was furloughed from her job as a bartender at the Hollywood Burbank Airport and immediately applied for jobless benefits. Yet like many people who’ve lost their income due to the public health crisis, her claim got caught up in an unemployment system that has been flooded with a gargantuan wave of applications. More than 45 million people in the country have filed for the benefits during the pandemic and more than 800,000 applications continue to pour in each week.
Madden said she never received a clear explanation why her benefits took so long to arrive.
“Nothing other than that there was ‘an enormous backlog of claims to rectify,’” she said.
A spokesperson for the Employment Development Department in California said that due to confidentiality reasons they can’t discuss individual cases. But he said that the department has processed a record number of claims of late and is in the process of expanding staff and improving technology.
Delays in unemployment benefits, which are becoming more common in the pandemic, can have dire consequences. Here’s what went wrong for Madden during the six months that she was stuck waiting for her money.