THE WAY WE WORK NOW
My Unemployment Benefits Are 5 Months Late — and Counting
I first filed in April, and I still don’t know if I’ll ever get paid
The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.
Jessica Ellis, 38, lives in California and works in the film industry. She spoke with Izzie Ramirez about being stuck in California’s backlog of unemployment insurance claims, which is growing by nearly 10,000 each day.
My husband and I both work in the film industry. He owns a camera rental company, and I freelance as a coverage analyst and screenwriter. It became evident our jobs were going away for a long time when everything shut down in March. Our income dropped from significant to zero in no time, so we started living entirely on our savings.
We’ve been very lucky to be able to put money away for a couple of years. We made our first feature film two years ago, and we’re trying to put the film through distribution, so now we have to make choices: Do we buy the music rights we need or do we have rent for another two months? It’s depressing because your savings are not meant to be survival money. I know so many people are struggling right now. We’re lucky, but it’s also…
