In January, when Gabriella Benedicto, 22, nabbed her first post-grad, full-time job with an event production company in New York City, it meant she had achieved a dream she’d held since high school.
Two months later, COVID-19 hit, and, as Benedicto puts it, “our entire industry disappeared overnight.” She was laid off in May, due to a reduction of force at her company.
“In the span of a 30-minute call, I effectively lost my entire income,” Benedicto explains in an email interview with Teen Vogue.
Because Benedicto was a full-time employee of her company when she was laid off, she qualified for unemployment insurance, and Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC), which went into effect on March 27, as part of the congressional CARES Act, and provided an additional $600 weekly for every person currently collecting unemployment insurance.
“For so many people across the country, [FPUC] bridges the gap that basic unemployment doesn’t fill,” Benedicto writes. “It has helped me fill the gap so that I can address my student loans, and so I don’t fall into debt. It has helped me financially prepare for a future in an industry where, realistically, there won’t be jobs for me until 2021.”
Pending congressional intervention, the additional $600 a week provided through the FPUC is set to expire on July 31, although filing deadlines in many states push that deadline up to July 25. Congress has yet to act on whether to extend the weekly FPUC stimulus, though the Washington Post reports GOP lawmakers have discussed reducing the $600 a week to between $200 and $400 a week.
On July 1, Stephanie Freed and Grant McDonald, two currently unemployed members of the entertainment industry, launched a website presence for Extend PUA, a grassroots organization that promotes actionable steps for passing extended FPUC and pandemic unemployment assistance (PUA) legislation through an entertainment industry lens.
“We basically started Extend PUA because we noticed that a lot of people were kind of floundering around looking for a way to expel their energy into this… problem of the FPUC expiring, but didn't really know how to take action,” McDonald says in an interview with Teen Vogue. “We didn't know either, so we… started culling together research to create this resource so that people could take meaningful action.”
Extend PUA compiled resources that constitute a 10-step action plan for people to use to advance the organization’s mission of extending the FPUA for the nearly 39 million people currently relying on the extra money, many of whom may need it beyond the July 31 expiration.
“We especially want to encourage our industry (arts and entertainment) to use the microphone at our feet to make demands for our own needs, but also for the needs of all the people who don’t have access to the microphone,” states the mission statement published on Extend PUA’s website.
While the entertainment industry has been hard-hit (as have countless other industries bolstered by the entertainment industry’s success), Freed says she hopes the Extend PUA movement can also serve as a microphone for many other workers who need the FPUC boost.
“A lot of other people receiving the $600 that aren't in our industry have a lot of other problems and issues, and the system has always been built against [them]," Freed says in an interview with Teen Vogue, "and we have the ability to speak up for those people, I hope.” She continues, “For me, personally, it's not as much about industries as it is about people, people that are struggling. There's also a disproportionate amount of people that are being affected that are people of color, and that is important to us. We just want to make sure that we're helping the people who have already been a step behind the system.”
Walter Cortina is a 17-year-old high school student and community activist in Minneapolis who has supported himself since his parents were both deported, before Walter turned 14. As a freshman in high school, Walter worked 64 hours a week at two part-time jobs, one of which was a car wash where he remained an employee until the business closed in March, due to COVID-19. Today, Walter has an internship with Minneapolis Foundation, where he is working to build up his own nonprofit organization, Bridgemakers.
“The pandemic made me lose my job — one that I was working at for three years,” Walter writes in an email interview with Teen Vogue. “It was very scary thinking about where I was going to get my next dollar. Currently, I am not eligible [for PUA] in the state of Minnesota.”
“I’m currently ineligible because I have a job [through the internship],” Walter explains. “If the case was that I was jobless, I wouldn’t be eligible because I am in high school. At the moment, I'd be fairly fine, but once my internship ends... I wouldn’t know [what] that situation would look like. Hopefully, [Congress does] extend it past this week.”
On May 12, the House introduced, and then soon after passed, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act (HEROES), which, among other things, proposed extending the $600 a week FPUC through January 2021. The Senate was expected to vote on the bill this week, after it resumed session on July 20, after being on recess since July 3. But on July 23, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate would not have a draft bill ready for review until “early next week,” according to CNN senior congressional correspondent Manu Raju.
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None of the various Republican-backed coronavirus-relief legislative proposals now floating among party members calls for an extension of the full FPUA payment, according to The Intelligencer.
On July 22, Extend PUA activists, in solidarity with grassroots organizations like Unemployed Action (a project of the Center for Popular Democracy), participated in a day of action, which included demonstrations outside of McConnell’s house, and Trump Tower in New York.
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"Cutting off parents and families from unemployment benefits and the $600 per week federal supplement would devastate not only working adults but their kids as well,” says Destiny Sharpe in a statement to Teen Vogue. Sharpe, an Economic Justice Organizer with SPACEs In Action, participated in the demonstration outside McConnell’s house on July 22. “Allowing families to fall into — or further into — poverty because of an ongoing pandemic is not a recipe for future success or a pathway to the middle class for our youth; it's an off-ramp."
While the $3 trillion HEROES Act would extend the $600 per week FPUC stimulus, the Senate may counter with its own plans in its response to the HEROES Act.
“There is a narrative going on right now, mostly coming from our legislators, saying there are a number of reasons people aren’t going back to work, but the main one they're trying to spin is that it's because people just want to collect $600, or that they’re too lazy to work, and that is insulting to millions of us,” McDonald says. “We love our jobs, and we want to go back to them. But a face-to-face industry — like entertainment, like hospitality, like travel — that is a dangerous thing to reopen right now.”
As for the workers currently relying on the extra money, there are still more questions than answers as to what will happen if Congress refuses to act before the fast-approaching expiration date.
“Without this funding, I likely only have a month or so of savings to get me by since I have only been part of the workforce for a little over a year,” writes Cati Kalinoski, a 23-year-old recent graduate of New York University, in an email interview with Teen Vogue. Prior to the pandemic, she freelanced as a theater-lighting designer and event production team member.
“I've recently started a food service job where I directly interact with customers, but it is hard to juggle the need for cash with increased exposure to COVID-19 through those jobs,” Kalinoski continues. “The pandemic doesn't disappear just because I have run out of money and am in a job that drastically increases my chances of catching the disease. And returning to ‘work’ isn't even returning to my industry. For many of my friends my age, the decision on the extension of FPUA, [if it’s ended,] feels like a death sentence, as many of us are being forced into jobs that increase our possibility of exposure via the service industry, since there is no way for us to ‘work from home’ in theater and events.”
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