'I'm drowning': Californians of color most affected by growing backlog of jobless aid

At her lowest point during the pandemic, Rachel Gomez-Wafer estimated that she was calling California’s unemployment office about 150 times a day.

When California shut down in March, the boutiques where Gomez-Wafer sells her organic skincare line, Dorothy Mae and Dominga, closed. The craft fairs and festivals where she makes most of her profits were canceled. She applied on 4 April for the pandemic unemployment assistance that was available to her as a small business owner but, like hundreds of thousands of other Californians who have filed for unemployment benefits, she soon found herself tangled in a months-long bureaucratic nightmare.

Nearly one-third of all Californian workers have filed for unemployment benefits since the start of the crisis in mid-March – 6.23 million workers, according to . A recent report from a strike team found that the employment development department (EDD), the office in charge of issuing unemployment benefits, had a backlog of claims so large that the department had to stop