Two million Californians lost their unemployment benefits last September when four pandemic-era federal programs ended. Some workers scrambled to find jobs, just as employers had hoped. But others, who’d been trying to find steady work for months, had their safety net pulled out from under them.
“It was a lot of people who had really been trying to re-enter the workforce and just hadn’t found that steady employment yet,” said Daniela Urban, executive director of the Sacramento-based Center for Workers’ Rights. After the federal programs ended, Urban and her organization found themselves in triage mode, connecting unemployed workers with homeless prevention services and CalFresh just to meet their basic needs.
“For most of the people that we were talking to,” Urban said, “this had been the exclusive monetary support for them and their household.”.
