What the End of the $600-a-Week U.S. Unemployment Check Will Mean for Travel’s Displaced Masses
Photo Credit: A hallway. Many unemployed hospitality workers have been relying on the extra $600 a week in unemployment relief the government has been providing in recent months. Pixabay
Skift Take
Countless unemployed workers in the travel industry have been relying on the extra weekly $600 from the government. Now that the payments are effectively over, many travel workers will face even greater hardship to just get by.
Joanne Liu, 53, is among the tens of thousands of laid-off workers in the U.S. travel industry who has relied on the $600-a-week unemployment benefit created by Congress to help those impacted by Covid-19. She's been on temporary layoff from her position as a housekeeper at The St. Regis San Francisco since March 16.
Her family was living paycheck-to-paycheck before the pandemic, so they don't have any savings in the bank, and she's not the only one who's lost work. Her husband is a driver for a laundry contractor connected to the hotel, part of Marriott, but with the lack of business at the hotel, he’s been without a job as well. She also has a daughter who's in college, lives near the campus, and who lost work at her student job because of the pandemic. So Liu is now helping her with expenses, like rent
