Oregon to pay 'waiting week' of unemployment benefits by Thanksgiving
Claire Withycombe
Salem Statesman Journal
Oregonians still waiting to be paid for their first week of unemployment benefits can likely expect to see that money soon.
Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, people seeking unemployment benefits would forgo benefits for the first week, in what's called a "waiting week."
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The federal government has given states permission to dispense with the waiting period due to the pandemic. But about eight months in, Oregon is just now processing that payment.
You can receive this payment if you have applied for regular unemployment insurance benefits between March 8, 2020 and Jan. 2, 2021.
If you received a waiting week credit instead of getting paid for your first week, you can expect to receive payment for that week. You can check your payment history for the credit through the state's online claims system.
You will not receive this payment if you have sought benefits through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which provides benefits for self-employed and contract or "gig" workers.
You don't need to do anything to get this money, said David Gerstenfeld, head of the state's Employment Department. "They don't need to call us," Gerstenfeld said.
The amount of money you will receive depends on when you filed your first week of benefits — if it was during weeks when the federal government boosted state benefits, you'll receive that amount as well. But if your first week was before those programs went into effect or after those programs expired, your payment won't include that money.
The state expects to start issuing these payments before Thanksgiving. The payments are expected to show up for most people in a few business days.
But about a fourth of people waiting for those "waiting week" payments may have to wait a bit longer because the agency will have to do some more work on the claim before they can send out the payment, Gerstenfeld said.
"Unfortunately, not everyone will get their payments that quickly," Gerstenfeld said.
But even if your claim requires more manual processing by the state, applicants don't need to do anything more to get the payment, he said.
"This is a situation where, even if their claim requires some manual processing, we are working on that and people don't have to do anything additional in order to receive the payment," he said.
For instance, people receiving extended benefits or benefits through the WorkShare program might take longer. But Gerstenfeld said the department is "confident" that those people will get paid by the end of December. It might take until the end of January to pay the most complex claims, he said.
The state is also preparing for another influx of claims for benefits.
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On Wednesday, Oregon began a two-week "freeze" to slow the transmission of COVID-19 to avoid overwhelming the state's hospital system. The freeze includes closing gyms and museums and moving restaurants to take-out only.
Gerstenfeld said the agency anticipates about 51,000 workers could be impacted.
"It's really hard to predict because this is almost exactly the time that each year we start to see a regular seasonal increase in claim filings," Gerstenfeld said. "And between that, the unpredictability of the recession that we're in now, not knowing what that was going to do to our regular seasonal increase, and just not having a lot of historical data about how pandemics affect employment, there's a lot of unknowns."