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When Kay Eda’s financial situation was better, a homeless man came up to her and asked for money. She didn’t help him out.
It wasn’t that she lacked compassion; she just wasn’t carrying any cash. The man was not pleased.
“One day you’ll be like me, too,” he hissed.
One day is now. Eda isn’t out on the street, and she isn’t panhandling for pennies, but with her unemployment about to expire and her bills piling up like the leaves outside her home, the Manhattan woman finds herself thinking often about what that homeless man said.
“It was a painful reminder that it could happen to any of us,” said Eda, who is in her fifties. “I’m not the only one. There are tons of people in the same boat.”
After the pandemic dried up her two main sources of income — language translation and acting work as an extra on productions — Eda began relying on unemployment insurance to help her through the bind.
But once the state jobless benefits ran out, Eda, like millions of unemployed Americans, signed up for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, one of two temporary federal jobless relief packages for which the clock is ticking.
According to the New York State Department of Labor, as of the week ending Nov. 7, the most recent reporting window, nearly 1.4 million New Yorkers were getting benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which benefits freelancers and independent contractors.
Over the same period, more than 660,000 New Yorkers were benefiting from the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which gave a 13-week extension to people who had maxed out their regular unemployment insurance.
Which means that at a time when job prospects are slim, nearly 2 million New Yorkers will lose their unemployment insurance if Congress doesn’t extend these programs or provide some other type of relief before they expire at the end of the year.
Hair stylist Lynn Hall, 27, said she has been out of work since March, when the pandemic forced the Queens salon where she worked to close.
Hall said unemployment insurance has supplemented the money she makes from selling her artwork and styling hair for a few clients in her home. But that may soon be gone.
“It’s especially tough because during these past 10 months I’ve had a lot of big payments to make,” Hall said. “I had to take my car to the mechanic, then I had a big dentist bill, and I had to take my bird to the vet. Any time any of these payments need to be made, I’m like, ‘Oh God, I need to buy groceries, too.’
“When we all got the stimulus check, I was kind of OK in the beginning, I had money in my savings account, I thought I was going to be good. That was in April. Now it’s super-dwindling. It’s crunch time.”
Among those concerned about the compensation quandary is President-elect Biden. In a conference call last week with congressional leaders, Biden discussed the need for job creation and a strong financial safety net.
“They discussed the urgent need for the Congress to come together in the lame duck session on a bipartisan basis to pass a bill that provides resources to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, relief for working families and small businesses, support for state and local governments trying to keep frontline workers on the payroll, expanded unemployment insurance, and affordable health care for millions of families,” according to a statement from Biden’s transition team.
Earlier this year, Rachel Deutsch, a supervising attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy, helped launch “Unemployed Action,” a grassroots effort involving about 16,000 jobless workers who lobbied Congress to extend the $600 weekly federal unemployment supplement that expired in July.
Since Congress still hasn’t extended the $600 benefits boost, Deutsch said her organization has had to switch gears to advocate for an extension of the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program and the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program — the only federal jobless aid initiatives that remain from the CARES Act stimulus bill signed into law in March.
“It is absolutely outrageous that we are facing a moment when the virus is climbing again and this is what we’re down to,” Deutsch said.
Deutsch said her group has bombarded members of Congress with phone calls for months. The group has also organized car parades and protests outside of congressional offices to bring attention to the need for more unemployment aid.
“People are not sitting idly by,” she said. “In addition to people constantly applying for jobs, they are being active in protesting and organizing — many for the first time in their lives. People are not sitting on their couches watching TV. They are fighting for their lives.”
Eda can attest to that. She said one of the worst parts of having to collect unemployment is people who assume she doesn’t want to work.
“We’re not lazy people doing nothing,” Eda said. “We’ve been doing the best we can. I love to work. I love to support myself. I’ve always been an independent professional. We’ve been treated like lazy bums. We’re not your enemy.”