Only one day after the U.S. Senate voted to extend unemployment benefits by thirteen weeks (see yesterday’s WIT), the California State Senate’s Labor Committee voted to approve a proposal by Governor Gray Davis to retroactively apply increases in unemployment benefits that took affect on January 1, back to September 11. The new legislation was proposed after Governor Davis and the State Legislature realized that a $220 increase in weekly benefit maximums passed last summer would not apply to workers laid off as a result of September 11. Business lobbyists and associations have opposed the legislation---which must still make it through the Appropriations Committee and pass both houses by a two-thirds margin---as an insupportable strain on the state’s unemployment funds.
See CARL INGRAM, Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2002