Nearly a quarter of a million unemployed Oregonians will receive a so-called“waiting week” payment this week.
Normally people who file an unemployment claim don’t receive benefits for their first week without work. That “waiting week” was eliminated due to the pandemic, but the Oregon Employment Department’s aging computer system wasn’t able to actually issue the payments, until now. That’s up to an eight month delay for some jobless Oregonians.
Oregon is the only state that hasn’t gotten the waiting week payments out to their intended recipients. Now, the Employment Department says the payments are on their way to about 246-thousand Oregonians, and should arrive in the next few days. However, the agency says another 170-thousand payments have to be manually processed and could take until the end of January.