New research finds the pandemic has likely stripped away most of the wage gains made after the Great Recession by California’s lowest earners. ...

In the five years before the pandemic, low-income Californians had begun to see substantial wage gains, chipping away at the income inequality gap between California’s haves and have-nots that has widened over the past 40 years. But the coronavirus pandemic is “likely stripping away many of these gains,” researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California found in a new report. The current coronavirus-induced recession has hit low-income workers the hardest, while higher income workers, la...

Since the federal weekly $600 boost expired last month, unemployed Californians have been living on impossibly low budgets — and expect to do so in the coming months even if President Trump’s weekend executive order helps break a partisan impasse in Congress. That’s because even if the federal unemployment stimulus gets extended, the state Employment Development Department estimates it could take the agency’s antiquated system as much as 20 weeks to deliver the payments. Overnight, the maximum ...