A San Mateo Safeway may regret their decision to fire an employee who stopped a $500 shoplifting attempt, and then deny that employee unemployment benefits, because a state board ruled they have to pay the unemployment, and now a wrongful termination suit is looming.

The grocery chain Safeway has a clean-up on Aisle Seven, at least from an employment law standpoint. You’d think that longtime, 22-year Safeway employee Antoinette Baez would have been named Employee of the Month in February 2023, when she thwarted a shoplifter attempting to steal roughly $500 of groceries from the store on De Anza Boulevard in San Mateo. And Baez even took a punch from that shoplifter, whom she did eventually get to leave the store, and her store manager said she acted appropriately after reviewing video of the incident.  

But the higher-ups at Safeway’s corporate offices apparently did not agree. As KPIX reports, Safeway fired Baez, and even denied her unemployment benefits afterward.

Why did Safeway fire Baez? "Three weeks later, there was an anonymous phone call complaining about her," her attorney Neil Eisenberg told KPIX. "It went to the Safeway board of directors, and in their infinite wisdom, they fired her because she touched the bag."

The company has a policy banning physical contact with customers even if they are committing a crime.

Moreover, the grocery chain denied Baez’s unemployment claims. “Safeway refused to pay unemployment benefits, claiming Baez was fired for misconduct,” as KPIX notes. “So, after 22 years of service, the single mother has been fighting a multi-billion-dollar corporation to collect $450 a week in benefits.”

Baez and her attorney appealed the decision to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, where they were awarded the lost unemployment benefits. "The claimant was aware of the employer's customer service shoplifting policy,” administrative law judge K.A. Duncan wrote in the ruling. “She was not aware she could be terminated for performing her duties, while on or off the clock, and without a warning."

Safeway is not appealing that ruling, so Baez will get her unemployment benefits, plus lost benefits for the period Safeway wasn’t paying. But the grocery chain may not be out of the woods on this one yet, as Baez’s attorney is also vowing to file a wrongful termination lawsuit.

Related: SFPD Touts 60 Arrests In New Retail Shoplifting Crackdown [SFist]

Image: Google Street View

The SF unemployment rate is a fabulously low 2.9%, but the FiDi is still a ghost town, and SF’s economic recovery lags behind that of other cities, according to a new report from the Office of the Controller.  

It has been a fact of life through the pandemic that tech companies are making bank, while the overall economy has been shakier. But other sectors are starting to improve, and unemployment is at a pretty historic low. Still, two of the main drivers of the San Francisco economy are tourism and office workers spending money downtown. And both tourism and the downtown SF economy are still moribund, according to a 23-page Status of the Re-Opening of the San Francisco Economy report from the city’s Office of the Controller

“The only industry that’s doing better in San Francisco than it was before the start of the pandemic was the tech industry,” the city’s Chief Economist Ted Egan sums it up to the SF Standard.

As seen above, SF’s office vacancy rate is still well above 20% (it was 6% pre-pandemic!).  Sure, many of us could care less whether corporate landlords like CB Richard Ellis are making their money. But you’ve got to feel for small downtown shops like Lee’s Sandwiches, or your favorite downtown bars, who are getting financially hammered by this ongoing absence of foot traffic.

And while the trends mirror what’s happening across the country, it is worse here than in large metros. See above how SF lags well behind other cities like Austin, Los Angeles, and New York in people showing up to work at the office. That said, we cannot help but mock our supposed tech-hub replacement Austin, Texas for their precipitous drop last January and February because their dumbfuck governor can’t reliably run a power grid (which by the way, is happening again right now). Hope you don't have to burn any furniture to stay warm, Elon!

And that’s just one of the reasons we’re skeptical of these “sky is falling in San Francisco” narratives. Yes, we are slower to return to the office than other cities, and the big conferences still are not returning. But unemployment is exceedingly low, and our minuscule COVID-19 death rate should be (but isn’t) the envy of the nation. Low unemployment and low mortality rate are trade-offs that I would take any day.

And hey, the rents are still wayyyy lower than before the pandemic, so that certainly doesn't suck.

Related: SF Unemployment Rate Dips to Just 3%, But More Still Unemployed Than Before Pandemic [SFist]

Image: @ibidsy via Unsplash

The latest unemployment numbers are encouraging — though the figures are from before the Omicron variant hit — with the unemployment rate hitting just 3% in SF, and even lower in Marin, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties.

We hate to publish a headline proclaiming “Hey everybody, really low unemployment!” while knowing full well that restaurants are still closing because of the pandemic, that event cancellations continue to upend the service and entertainment sectors, and the state unemployment benefits system remains an absolute mess. But Friday’s release of the latest monthly unemployment numbers brought historically good data, though the numbers are from before the Omicron variant did its disastrous thing.

You can see it visualized above, and Socketsite reports that the San Francisco unemployment rate was just 3% in December. And it ain’t just us, as KPIX adds that “Marin, San Mateo and Santa Clara had the lowest rates [in California], below 3%.” (Marin County is the lowest in the state, at 2.7%)

California’s statewide unemployment rate is a much higher 6.5%. But that’s still good news, as the state Employment Development Department (EDD) notes that the unemployment rate “dropped a half percentage point from November 2021,” when it was 7%.

Though as the Chronicle notes, people are still quitting their jobs like mad, a term described statistically as “quits".

“Despite the more than 400,000 quits across California in November, the state saw 709,000 hires, following on the 691,000 people hired in October,” the Chron notes.

Socketsite points out this is still not a full recovery. “There are still 21,400 fewer employed people in San Francisco than there were prior to the pandemic and 17,300 fewer people in the labor force,” the site points out. “But 70,700 jobs have been recovered since the pandemic hit and over 30,000 people have returned to the local labor force."

Again, we’d like to see see next month’s numbers to get a truer sense of things. The EDD is up front that “employment data for the month of December 2021 is taken from the survey week including December 12.” That’s when Omicron cases were negligible, but Omicron’s affect on Bay Area workplaces has been anything but negligible since then.

Related: NorCal Woman Has Allegedly Been Collecting Unemployment Benefits In Dianne Feinstein's Name [SFist]

Image: @SabrinaNC9 via Twitter

Scammers have racked up an estimated $8 billion in benefits and taken from the pockets of a million and a half genuinely unemployed people, who then find themselves locked out of their accounts, as California’s unemployment fraud spirals out of control.

At first we thought it was funny when a Roseville woman used Dianne Feinstein’s name and social security number to scam $21,000 in fraudulent unemployment benefits. Though it seemed more serious when tens of thousands of prison inmates' names were fraudulently used to raid California unemployment funds intended for out-of-work gig workers, in what Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert said “appears to be the most significant fraud on taxpayer funds in California history.” At the time of those November and December reports, Bank of America estimated that the fraud totaled about $2 billion.    

That figure now looks like peanuts, KGO reports that the new estimate is $8 billion in fraudulent unemployment benefits lost to scams. And the burden falls on the genuinely unemployed individuals, with Sacramento's KXTV noting that some 1.4 million unemployed Californians have been locked out of their accounts.

A particularly cruel ‘double-dip’ variant of the fraud has hit Bank of America customers, as explained in the above segment from KGO. Hackers crack into an Employment Development Department (EDD) account, essentially one’s benefits card and access to money, racking up mysterious charges in this case from a company called “WHOGOHOST - WEST AFRICA.” Then Bank of America locks the customer out of their legitimate account, letting the customers hang in the lurch with no access to money.

“Seven thousand dollars taken out of my account. It hurts,” unemployed bartender Diane Davis told KGO. “I’m on hold for three hours, then you finally get someone on the phone, and click, you get disconnected.”

It got worse. She then attempted to log into her own account, and was greeted with a big red X and the message “Your account cannot be accessed.” (After KGO’s report, Davis did get access to her account and funds reimbursed.)

"EDD has become an absolute catastrophe," Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA) told KXTV. " Every week that innocent people go without their unemployment check, they're making it more difficult for folks to buy groceries and pay rent, pay their mortgage. And the fact that this agency after a year still can't figure out the difference between fraud claims and legitimate needs is incredibly frustrating."

KXTV, who have really been on this story given their Sacramento focus, explains that there is a way to appeal EDD’s ruling if you’re locked out of your account. Unsurprisingly, it’s the kind of process where you could more quickly remove your own appendix. You have to submit a paper appeal form, and then wait for a field office to schedule you a phone interview to make your case. An employment expert tells KXTV that “The general overturn rate is over 50 percent in favor of the claimant,” which is great, except you’d rather unemployed people just not have to go through the nightmare in the first place.

Related: SF Supervisor Hopes to Raise Funds From Local Billionaires to Save Nightlife Venues [SFist]

Image: Job seekers look at job resource pamphlets during the "Put Your Talent to Work" job and resource expo December 17, 2008 in Concord, California. The California Employment Development Department hosted the job fair that was geared towards unemployed contruction, real estate and mortgage workers. Over 1,200 people attended the event that had been expected to draw closer to 400. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

One of apparently many cases of unemployment benefit fraud being investigated this year involves a Sacramento area woman who used to work for the Employment Development Department, and who apparently cashed in $21,000 in fraudulent claims using the name and social security number of Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Bank of America, which administers the EDD's benefit debit cards, was the one to flag the claims being made in Feinstein's name — not the EDD itself, which has apparently been more than willing to approve claims for any and everyone who applies, including death row inmates, even though thousands of Californians said they were unable to get their benefits processed when the pandemic began.

On Thursday, in addition to charges against several other women, federal prosecutors announced mail fraud charges against 43-year-old Andrea M. Gervais of Roseville, who had apparently been impersonating Feinstein for the purpose of collecting EDD funds. Prosecutors said that Gervais had previously worked for the EDD herself, until being fired two year ago.

"Think about this for a minute: EDD issues a debit card to Senator Dianne Feinstein! How does that happen?” says Republican Assemblymember Jim Patterson, speaking to the Associated Press. "I’ll tell you how, EDD is complicit in the fraud by mailing out Social Security numbers to scammers; or they are utterly incompetent by not even checking eligibility before they issue the debit card. Either way, EDD has aided and abetted the fraud."

Bank of America told the EDD that it has identified at least 345,000 fraudlent claims totaling about $2 billion.

Some are blaming the agency's haste on the pressure that was put on them to clear a backlog of claims that at one point rose to 1.6 million. Last month, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert went public with what she was a widespread rash of fraud targeting the EDD, with suspects filing claims in dozens of counties around the state, some using the names of prison inmates — which apparently the EDD's system can not cross-check for. Among them were well known names including convicted wife-murderer Scott Peterson, Yosemite quadruple-murderer Cary Stayner, and Southern California child-killer Susan Eubanks.

Schubert estimated the fraud to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but according to Bank of America it could be in the billions.

Federal prosecutors on Thursday also announced charges against 36-year-old Sholanda Thomas, an inmate at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, who's accused of conspiring with former inmate 37-year-old Christina Smith to file fraudulent EDD claims. And the feds are charging former EDD call center worker Nyika Gomez of San Diego, who they say conspired with her inmate boyfriend to file fraudulent claims.

All the suspects could face prison sentences of up to 20 years.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said, "This theft of taxpayer dollars intended to assist our citizens in a very difficult economic time simply will not be tolerated."

Previously: Massive Fraud Scheme Netted 'Hundreds of Millions' For CA Unemployment Scammers Using Prison Inmates' Names

Photo of Gervais via the U.S. Attorney's Office

Unemployment remains at just 3.2 percent in San Francisco as of the end of January, however that is up from 2.9 percent in December, and a whopping 6,900 lost their jobs in that one-month span, as Socketsite reports — marking the single biggest month-to-month drop since 2009.

That may sound scary, but Socketsite also puts it in perspective by noting that there are 103,600 more people with paychecks living in the city than there were in January 2010 — kind of a shocking figure.

Meanwhile, in January 2017, employment dropped by 7,200 in Alameda County, but that followed an upward revision of the number of employed people in December, but still even with that dip the number of employed people in the county is 12,500 higher than at the same time last year.

We've all been expecting a market correction of some kind to hit us, and that appears to be happening in small ways like the major layoffs at Zenefits last month, the January layoffs at Munchery, and that small round of layoffs at Twitter last fall.

And the tech economy can't be doing too terribly if Snap Inc. could arrive with such a frenzy on Wall Street, giving it a better opening day than Google, Facebook, or Alibaba, and making CEO and founder Evan Spiegel — don't let this depress you — officially richer than Oprah.

Eurico Chin had time to go for a meandering walk that ended up at the Safeway at Noriega and 30th Avenue: after all, he was unemployed. Perhaps his jobless state was what caused him to consider buying a lottery ticket.

“Why not?” he told the California Lottery he thought on that late May day. “I’m already here, might a well buy" five SuperLotto Plus Quick Pick lines.

On May 24, the winning numbers were announced. The next day, Chin said he went online to check the numbers, and realized that he'd just won $70 million.

“First I was in shock, I couldn’t believe it" said Chin, who has refused media interviews or photos, to the Lottery. "I checked the ticket several times to make sure that I won.”

Chin took the next few weeks to formulate a plan to invest most of his money, though he might also buy a house or a car. He's still deciding on whether to take a one-time cash payment, which is estimated to be nearly $41 million before taxes, or the option that would give him the winnings prior to taxes over the course of 30 years.

Though he hasn't been working, he apparently also took that time to decide to retire, saying “I won’t have to worry about money. And I think that’s the main thing.”

[California Lottery]

While style-free male nerds and affectedly geek-chic (vomit) young girls continue to make a killing in Mission Bay, SOMA, and Silicon Valley, the rest of the country still feels the pinch of post-recession unemployment. According to a report released today, key factors (i.e., job creation, unemployment, length of the workweek and hourly earnings) in job creation have more or less stalled. Carolyn Lochhead from SF Chronicle reports:

Today's report that a miniscule 18,000 jobs were added in June, and the sharp downward revision of May's already small estimate of a 54,000 gain to just 25,000 provides the clearest evidence yet that the recovery has stalled. These numbers will play directly into the debt negotiations that may culminate in a White House meeting Sunday, playing into Democratic arguments against immediate spending cuts, and GOP arguments against tax increases. A stalled recovery would put President Obama's re-election in clear jeopardy.

Not good.

With another stint in the White House in clear jeopardy, President Barack Obama released the following response to the unemployment report.

Remarks by the President on the Monthly Jobs Report

11:05 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Obviously, over the last couple of days, the debate here in Washington has been dominated by issues of debt limit, but what matters most to Americans, and what matters most to me as President, in the wake of the worst downturn in our lifetimes, is getting our economy on a sounder footing more broadly so the American people can have the security they deserve.

And that means getting back to a place where businesses consistently grow and are hiring, where new jobs and new opportunity are within reach, where middle-class families once again know the security and peace of mind they’ve felt slipping away for years now. And today’s job report confirms what most Americans already know: We still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do to give people the security and opportunity that they deserve.

We’ve added more than 2 million new private sector jobs over the past 16 months, but the recession cost us more than 8 million. And that means that we still have a big hole to fill. Each new job that was created last month is good news for the people who are back at work, and for the families that they take care of, and for the communities that they’re a part of. But our economy as a whole just isn’t producing nearly enough jobs for everybody who’s looking.

We’ve always known that we’d have ups and downs on our way back from this recession. And over the past few months, the economy has experienced some tough headwinds -- from natural disasters, to spikes in gas prices, to state and local budget cuts that have cost tens of thousands of cops and firefighters and teachers their jobs. The problems in Greece and in Europe, along with uncertainty over whether the debt limit here in the United States will be raised, have also made businesses hesitant to invest more aggressively.

The economic challenges that we face weren’t created overnight, and they’re not going to be solved overnight. But the American people expect us to act on every single good idea that’s out there. I read letter after letter from folks hit hard by this economy. None of them ask for much. Some of them pour their guts out in these letters. And they want me to know that what they’re looking for is that we have done everything we can to make sure that they are rewarded when they’re living up to their responsibilities, when they’re doing right by their communities, when they’re playing by the rules. That’s what they’re looking for, and they feel like the rules have changed. They feel that leaders on Wall Street and in Washington -- and believe me, no party is exempt -- have let them down. And they wonder if their efforts will ever be reciprocated by their leaders.

They also make sure to point out how much pride and faith they have in this country; that as hard as things might be today, they are positive that things can get better. And I believe that we can make things better. How we respond is up to us. There are a few things that we can and should do, right now, to redouble our efforts on behalf of the American people.

Let me give you some examples. Right now, there are over a million construction workers out of work after the housing boom went bust, just as a lot of America needs rebuilding. We connect the two by investing in rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our railways and our infrastructure. And we could put back to work right now some of those construction workers that lost their jobs when the housing market went bust. Right now, we can give our entrepreneurs the chance to let their job-creating ideas move to market faster by streamlining our patent process. That’s pending before Congress right now. That should pass.

Today, Congress can advance trade agreements that will help businesses sell more American-made goods and services to Asia and South America, supporting thousands of jobs here at home. That could be done right now. Right now, there are a lot of middle-class families who sure could use the security of knowing that the tax cut that I signed in December to help boost the economy and put a thousand dollars in the pockets of American families, that that’s still going to be around next year. That’s a change that we could make right now.

There are bills and trade agreements before Congress right now that could get all these ideas moving. All of them have bipartisan support. All of them could pass immediately. And I urge Congress not to wait. The American people need us to do everything we can to help strengthen this economy and make sure that we are producing more jobs.

Also to put our economy on a stronger and sounder footing for the future, we’ve got to rein in our deficits and get the government to live within its means, while still making the investments that help put people to work right now and make us more competitive in the future. As I mentioned, we’ve had some good meetings. We had a good meeting here yesterday with leaders of both parties in Congress. And while real differences remain, we agreed to work through the weekend and meet back here on Sunday.

The sooner we get this done, the sooner that the markets know that the debt limit ceiling will have been raised and that we have a serious plan to deal with our debt and deficit, the sooner that we give our businesses the certainty that they will need in order to make additional investments to grow and hire and will provide more confidence to the rest of the world as well, so that they are committed to investing in America.

Now, the American people sent us here to do the right thing not for party, but for country. So we’re going to work together to get things done on their behalf. That’s the least that they should expect of us, not the most that they should expect of us. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves over the next several weeks and next several months. I know that people in both parties are ready to do that as well. And we will keep you updated on the progress that we’re making on these debt limit talks over the next several days. Thank you.

Q How was the meeting with Mrs. Pelosi?

THE PRESIDENT: It was good.

Obviously, George W. Bush is to blame for this entire mess. We kid! In fact, we don't even know where to being the finger-pointing. Feel free to do so in the comments.

For today's snoozeflash from the local media outlets, the Examiner reports that the two San Francisco offices administering the 2010 census haven't had any trouble finding candidates to fill the 3,000 temporary jobs they're offering as census takers and managers. They've got five qualified candidates for every slot in fact, so that's 15,000 people in town, many of whom are multi-lingual and can head into the Richmond speaking Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Russian, and whatever else.

Census forms go out in the mail today, and if you don't mail yours back by April 1, a census taker will come knocking to count you. This process is, of course, terrifying for illegal immigrants, so it's also the delicate jobs of these census takers to somehow explain that they come in peace, they will not report them to immigration, but they still need to know how many children they have and how much money they make. [Examiner]

80 initiatives and referenda and are out and about around the state with advocates trying to collect enough signatures so they can qualify for an upcoming election ballot. You might see people at farmers markets asking you to support the initiative for state parks or maybe you signed the one to legalize marijuana, which has already been turned in and will appear on the November ballot, pending signature verification.

A handful of new initiatives were cleared for signature gathering yesterday, the Secretary of State announced. If approved for the ballot, voters will be asked to prohibit voting for some, weaken environmental laws during high rates of unemployment and make it harder for taxes, levies and charges to be imposed by the state legislature. Here are the summaries of each:

Long seen by economists as a truer marker than the traditional unemployment rate, CA's underemployment rate hit a shocking 22% in September. Per the Chron: "That figure includes 1.9 million jobless Californians, 1.4 million people who had to work part time, and 865,000 adults loosely described as discouraged." (Full chart after the jump.) Many of those working part time are people who were furloughed or otherwise given fewer work hours rather than being laid off. And those "discouraged" folks are the ones who no longer qualify for unemployment and who have basically given up on looking for work.

Both of our previous recent recessions have been followed by relatively shitty employment recoveries, and this one looks to be the worst jobless recovery yet. So, uh, if you're still funemployed out there we hope you're still enjoying it! And the Chron suggests maybe finding a new skill, like web design. Heh.

Found in the window of Kenneth Wingard at 2319 Market.

While some have declared the recession over, more or less, California's job rate might disagree. In August, we witnessed the jobless figure "climb to 12.2 percent last month, the highest on records dating back to the 1970's,"n according to CBS5/AP. But California wasn't the only state to see crowds converge at unemployment offices. "Forty-two states lost jobs last month, up from 29 in July, with the biggest payroll cuts coming in Texas, Michigan, Georgia and Ohio." Sigh.

Not unlike speed-dating events where desperation and forced smiles hang thick in the air, so-called 'pink-slip' parties are allegedly making a comeback. These were popular during the dot-com bust eight years ago where the "funemployed" gathered to "network" and coach each other toward better job prospects. We think there used to be booze involved, but anyway ABC News brings us this story about one such party over Labor Day weekend in San Jose, hosted by these people, where folks gathered to learn about things like Facebook, and to be told that they might need to find a new field.