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Alabama Department of Labor Secretary Fitzgerald Washington announced today that ADOL has disbursed more than $1.5 billion in COVID-19 related unemployment compensation benefits. Alabama is paying benefits under all three programs covered in the CARES Act: Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC), Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC).
$1,597,770,137 has been paid to 292,493 claimants in COVID-19 related benefits over the period covering March 16 – June 3, 2020. This represents 1,714,392 weeks paid.
$1,147,359,000 of those funds are FPUC, the $600 stimulus benefit added to weekly unemployment compensation benefits.
$34,302,995 represent PUA funds, and $8,834,035 represent PEUC funds.
ADOL has issued payments to 92% of those filing COVID-19 related active claims since March 16, 2020.
“92% of COVID-19 related claims have been paid,” said Washington. “At this point, we are paying out the equivalent of a ‘normal’ year’s worth of benefits every two weeks. We have paid out more in almost three months than we have for the past seven years combined.”
“While we continue to make progress on paying these claims, we understand that there are still many Alabamians out there who still need our assistance.  We remain dedicated to providing them with that assistance,” continued Washington. “We have opened a new call center that is dedicated to answering inquiry calls, and it’s up and running with more than 60 new staffers, with the expectation that that number will double by the end of next week. We’ve also launched a new ‘live chat’ service available from the UI Claims Tracker to further assist Alabamians with questions.”
This week, ADOL debuted new dashboards that show the dollar amounts paid per program, both COVID-19 related and year-to-date, along with demographic information about unemployment compensation claimants.
In April, nearly 60% of claimants were female, and 26.8% of claimants were between the ages of 25-34.
For Escambia County, the total number of claims for the week ending on May 30, there have been 188 claims filed.
Additionally, information and FAQs can be found at ADOL’s COVID-19 resource page at https://labor.alabama.gov/newsfeed/News_CovID19.aspx.