“What am I supposed to do now, how am I going to support my seven-year-old son,” said Dakota Price.
Price, 25, was getting ready to serve her third table of the day at Philly’s Sports Grill when she found out she was out of work indefinitely.
The part-time student, waitress and mom relies solely on her tips for income and is now desperately searching for some sort of financial compensation for the sake of her son.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego issued an emergency declaration last week that ordered a citywide closure of all bars and for dine-in restaurants to switch to delivery, take out, or drive-thru only.
While Arizonians fear for their stability amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Economic Policy Institute estimates that over 100,000 of them will lose their jobs by summer 2020.
Gov. Doug Ducey announced several changes were made to the Arizona unemployment insurance system via executive order on Friday.
The order extends the 2019 tax deadline from April 15 to July 15. It also waives the work search requirement and the one week waiting period for a person out of work to apply for unemployment benefits.
Most importantly, the order ensures that people facing financial struggles due to COVID-19 are now eligible for unemployment benefits.
Prior to this executive order, Price would not come close to meeting the criteria. While she may now be eligible for unemployment insurance, the benefits are minuscule in comparison to the amount she would need to get by.
Unemployment benefits are designed to replace roughly half of one’s prior weekly earnings. In Arizona, the unemployment benefits are capped at 240 dollars a week.
Dave Wells, research director at the Grand Canyon Institute, explained that Arizona has some of the worst unemployment benefits in the whole country.
Arizona has the second-lowest cap for unemployment benefits in the United States, beating Mississippi by just 5 dollars, Wells explained.
“If you work full time for anything more than minimum wage, you’ll get far less than half of your income,” he said. “Many people will get nothing at all because the hours are reduced, in most cases they take that away from your unemployment benefits and in many cases that will lead to no benefits at all.”
Arizona has not addressed the unemployment benefit cap in 16 years, said Wells. During that time, the inflation rate in Arizona has increased by 41.23%, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Prior to Ducey’s new order, Arizona had the hardest criteria for eligibility. For servers, bartenders or baristas, their work schedule and nature of their income made it extremely difficult to receive any sort of unemployment benefits.
In order to qualify for unemployment insurance benefits, you would have to reach the minimum income threshold, which is 390 times the Arizona minimum wage in your highest income quarter. This works out to be about 30 hours a week at $12 dollars an hour.
Arizona was the only state where someone could work 25 hours and week at $12 dollars an hour and not qualify for unemployment benefits, said Wells.
Other states need to follow similar executive actions to accommodate people who have lost their jobs due to COVID-19, said Sanjeev Khagram, Dean and Director General at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management.
“We need to make sure that unemployment benefits not only become easier to get access to but that they are actually much greater in order to support the mass amount of people that are unemployed now,” he said.
Contact the reporter at imartill@asu.edu
