With coronavirus cases on the decline and businesses ramping up hiring, the state Department of Labor is cautioning unemployment insurance claimants that some forms of federal assistance will likely expire by late summer.
In a statement, the agency said federal programs such as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation and Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation — the last of which has supplied jobless Americans with $300 per week since last year — are not expected to be renewed by Congress and will probably run out by Sept. 4. Connecticut’s state unemployment and extended benefits programs will remain available.
The announcement would seem to signal that Connecticut officials are not interested in ending the extra $300-per-week benefit early, as 26 mainly Republican-led states have elected to do, arguing that the payments disincentivize people from looking for work.
Since March 2020, the Department of Labor has disbursed approximately $9 billion in unemployment payments, including $4.4 billion from the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program, which at one point was paying out $600 per week to claimants.
Also this week, the Labor Department is requiring that residents collecting unemployment insurance now file their job search activities online. The work search mandate was reimposed in late May, and since then claimants had been responsible for cataloguing their own search efforts. That process will now move online, though residents are being advised to keep their June records in case of an audit.
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