Driven by rising poverty and inadequate retirement income, older people are increasingly turning to employment, with labor force participation in urban areas climbing more steeply.
The state’s employment office will review the cases of 136,000 residents who collectively received $1.2 billion in “overpayments.” Only approximately 21,000 residents can expect to have their repayments waived.
The Pennsylvania county has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels for job availability despite the unemployment rate hitting record lows. Nationally there are 11 million open jobs but only 5.7 million unemployed workers.
Calls to the state’s Employment Security Department were answered just 12.5 percent of the time in December and problems left over from the pandemic continue to backlog the benefits system, delaying relief for residents.
Two million Californians lost unemployment benefits last September when pandemic-era programs ended a lifeline for many workers, specifically those who were less-educated, Black or over the age of 64.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced a bipartisan agreement to fill the financial hole in the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund, which once stood at $4.5 billion, that was depleted by the pandemic.
In September, the state had nearly 1.03 million job openings, which amounts to almost 1.8 openings for every unemployed resident. Dallas-Fort Worth added 255,000 jobs in the last year, roughly 2.5 times the usual pace.
A report from the University of Alaska Center for Economic Development found that, for the last seven years, the state has performed “at or near the bottom” in employment growth, unemployment, net migration and GDP.
Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office reported that the state’s antiquated unemployment system and “ad hoc workarounds” contributed to a loss of billions of dollars in improper payments.
There was concern earlier this year that the Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund would diminish, but the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations reported this week that it has grown to $232 million.
A state audit found that the Workforce Development office paid nearly $125,000 to deceased people and another nearly $114,000 to ineligible prisoners in the 2019 to 2020 fiscal year.
As of July, approximately 440,000 Louisianans have voluntarily left their jobs this year, the highest total for the first seven months of a year since 2000. But experts say mobility signals a healthy economy, albeit a challenging one for employers.
The Labor Department has increased its previous estimate of pandemic-era unemployment benefits fraud by nearly $30 billion. The agency has opened more than 190,000 investigations and charged more than 1,000 with fraud.
An audit found that the state’s unemployment agency likely paid between $441 million and $466 million in fake claims from March 2020 to March 2022. It also flagged numerous legitimate claimants as fraud.
A federal judge has approved a settlement between the state and 54 residents who had been on a work-release program but lost COVID-related unemployment benefits when the pandemic stopped their work opportunity.
The economy keeps adding them by the hundreds of thousands. But those big numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Most Read
