For some Virginians, quest for jobless aid comes at a price – By Michael Martz (Richmond Times-Dispatch) / June 18 2021
Elizabeth Cogar didn’t apply for Virginia unemployment benefits after her freelance writing job ended early last year because she didn’t think she was eligible.
Cogar, 62, changed her mind last April after Congress offered a new kind of emergency benefit to self-employed Americans who had lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the benefits she received initially — about $87 a week from the state, plus $600 a week from the federal government through July — weren’t based on her eligibility as a “gig worker” under the new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. They were based on traditional state unemployment rules and Cogar’s brief employment at a Northern Neck newspaper in 2019, a job she left because of the long commute between Kilmarnock and her home in Richmond.
“I was happy to get anything,” she said.
