Unemployment appeals pile up in California

    Rejected for unemployment benefits of up to 450 dollars a week, more and more jobless Californians are awaiting action by a state appeals board, the Los Angeles Times said.

    In all, a record number of 68,135 jobless people have filed unemployment appeals and the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board (UIAB) is supposed to decide within 30 days whether the state wrongly denied an individual's jobless benefits, the paper said.

    About nine out of 10 appeals come from the newly unemployed who are denied benefits by the California Employment Development Department, according to the paper.

    The number of those appeals has increased steadily since last summer as California's unemployment rate climbed to 9.3 percent in December, when 1.7 million Californians were without jobs, the paper said.

    "The workload has been horrendous because of the economic times we are facing," Jehan Flagg, the UIAB's acting executive director, was quoted as saying.

    She blamed "mismanagement under the previous head of the organization" for a backlog that is now 81 percent higher than when she took over Aug. 1.

    Critics partially blame the board's performance on the failure of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration to let the board hire enough people to handle cases in a timely manner -- even if the federal government pays the bill, the paper said.

    The federal government has demanded that the state come up with a plan to fix the mess this month, said the paper.

    California takes longer to resolve unemployment appeals than any other state except Virginia, according to Labor Department data.