California Explores Unemployment For Undocumented Workers
When the pandemic hit, Rosalba Reyes, 52, felt she had no choice but to continue her work as a restaurant kitchen lead, although she worried about catching the coronavirus. She and her husband have underlying health conditions, as do her elderly parents, who live with them and their teenage son in a small Oakland apartment.
But her husband, Manuel Pacheco, 54, was laid off for three months when the pizza restaurant where he buses tables closed; and her mother, Juana Ponce, 71, saw her housecleaning jobs dry up; while her father, Tomas Reyes, 77, couldn’t work because of cancer treatments.
“I felt like I was putting the money I needed over my family’s health and over my own health,” Rosalba Reyes said in Spanish through an interpreter.
Her income barely kept the family afloat — especially because none of them received job-loss benefits. The Mexican immigrants are all undocumented workers, which means they cannot qualify for unemployment insurance.
The pandemic vividly proved the crucial role of unemployment insurance. When millions of people were thrown out of work overnight, those temporary benefits helped them make ends meet.
But the hundreds of thousands of Californians who lack work authorization couldn’t receive unemployment or federal stimulus payments, even though they were among the hardest hit by the pandemic.
While the state provided some stipends for undocumented immigrants, those fell far short of a regular weekly check, leaving many families, such as that of Reyes, facing severe economic hardships.
“We were very, very tight on money during that time,” Reyes said. “We were taking advantage of food banks. We were also helped by a (nonprofit) organization. We dipped into our savings. We barely had enough.”
Now a proposed bill, AB2847, the Excluded Workers Pilot Program, would create a one-year program to provide unemployment benefits for undocumented people. Its backers hope to make it permanent.
“We’re trying to make sure that our safety-net programs are there to help all people in need by making everyone eligible,” said Assembly Member Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella (Riverside County), the bill’s sponsor. “We’re trying to prevent people going into debt, expending their entire life savings, becoming homeless and hungry.”
The state has about 2 million undocumented residents, including about 1.1. million workers, said Edward Flores, associate professor of sociology and co-director of the UC Merced Community and Labor Center, who studies that population.