“Before the pandemic, just over 40,000 were on continuing UI claims. Now, there are well over 100,000 on state or federal UI benefits.”
Other changes in UI policy have also kept claims abnormally elevated deep into the recovery. Supplemental benefits of $300 per week (formerly $600) have given unemployed and underemployed workers unusually strong incentives to apply for UI. In addition, almost every state waived its usual job search requirements early in the pandemic. These waivers, most of which were still in effect earlier this year, have made UI benefits available to many individuals for whom caregiving responsibilities or fears of infection have complicated returning to work. [...] This dramatic shift in the UI claimant pool owes largely to the federal PUA program, which was created in March 2020 to provide benefits to classes of workers not covered by traditional UI.7 Because federal guidelines restrict PUA to those who are ineligible for regular UI, many states instruct benefit-seekers that they must apply (and be denied) for regular UI before they can apply for PUA. As a result, many self-employed workers and other atypical claimants have been counted towards both regular UI and PUA in successive weeks, even though initial claims for these two programs are tallied separately in government statistics.