EDD

Good morning, California. It’s Friday, May 21. Goodbye to all that Thursday was a brutal day in the state Legislature. Hundreds of bills met their demise or were watered down as lawmakers raced through an opaque process called the “suspense file,” a tool often used to euthanize proposals without having to cast a politically precarious […]

Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing a mask dilemma. If he updates the state’s mask guidance to align with that of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which on Thursday announced that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks or physically distance in most places — he risks contradicting his own […]

“Everything that should be up is up and everything that should be down is down,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in January when lifting California’s regional stay-at-home order. Today, that statement holds true for many aspects of California’s pandemic response — vaccinations are up, infections are down, hospitalizations are down — but rings hollow when it […]

With the governor set to unveil his revised budget proposal, we urge him to remember that now is a time to be practical.

It’s a troubling trend: For two out of three months in 2021, California’s unemployment rate shrank partly from thousands of people dropping out of the workforce. The Golden State’s unemployment rate hit a pandemic low of 8.3% in March, down from 8.5% in February, according to figures released Friday by the Employment Development Department. But […]

Good morning, California. It’s Friday, April 16. Nearly halfway there California is at its pandemic best. No counties are left in the state’s most restrictive reopening tier. California has the lowest coronavirus positivity rate in the country. And 49% of eligible residents are at least partially vaccinated — a number sure to have crossed the […]

Good morning, California! It’s Monday, April 5. I’m CalMatters politics reporter Ben Christopher, filling in for Emily Hoeven, who is enjoying a much-deserved week off. A “gold rush” amid the calamity This much is not news: California’s Employment Development Department, the state agency responsible for shelling out unemployment claims to millions of jobless Californians, is still […]

The state’s unemployment agency has signed $236 million in private contracts as jobless workers await benefits. EDD says it needs the outside help.

Good morning, California. It’s Monday, March 29. Businesses to shoulder costs California’s unemployment rate fell to a pandemic low of 8.5% in February, the Employment Development Department announced Friday — even as its jobless benefits fund sank deeper into the red, imperiling economic recovery. The Golden State recovered nearly 91% of the jobs it lost […]

The state went deep into debt to keep jobless benefits flowing during the pandemic. And if it doesn’t fix its $48 billion unemployment problem, that could derail COVID-19 recovery.