It has been over five months since workers have been either terminated or in reduced hours due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and according to Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP), out of 8,312 applicants that the Department of Labor have received, 4,730 still await for their Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation.<\/p>\n
The PUA and FPUC programs have been in the works since last March 27, and have been slowly distributed since July 17, still 4,730 applicants has yet to be paid, and now face evictions, cars repossessions, overdue loan payments, etc. <\/p>\n
Sablan stated in a letter to Gov. Ralph DLG Torres that the U.S. Department of Labor has released $119,770,584, however Sablan is worried about the \u201cslow pace\u201d of the distribution of payments to the applicants who are out of work and are in urgent need of assistance.
\n\u201cAs you might imagine, the congressional office continues to receive numerous requests for help from some of those thousands who are waiting,\u201d said Sablan. He added that the people who have been reaching out to him shares that they are \u201cunable\u201d to reach the Commonwealth\u2019s Department of Labor by phone.<\/p>\n
Sablan added that the people who have been reaching out to him share that they are devastated and desperate for the $945 weekly benefit that U.S. Congress made available in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act last March 27, and last Aug. 27 marks the fifth month since the CARES Act was signed into law.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis situation is even more difficult to explain, knowing that the CARES Act also provided your government with over $2 million to pay for staff to process the applications and that you have not put all that money to use,\u201d said Sablan.<\/p>\n
In Sablan\u2019s letter to Torres, he pleads that Torres do everything, in his will power, that he can do to get the PUA and FPUC \u201cinto the pockets of the thousands of people who qualify and have not yet been paid.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It has been over five months since workers have been either terminated or in reduced…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":328377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}