CA EDD is so hard to reach that the unemployed pay go-betweens to do it for them

The phone number for EDD is 1-800-300-5616,1,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,11 (some suggest 24, but that's technically an abuse that attempts to contact a different department for employers. 121 would be a more appropriate set of options, but that injects additional recordings and leads to same queue).

The system has an an unskippable 1:30 greeting, which causes enormous waste of time.

If you have to figure out how to program a phone to press buttons after a 1:30 timeout, the system is broken.

If you call on TTY, which is a functional text interface, they will eventually answer and then claim abuse and disconnect. That is likely an ADA violation.

Your odds of reaching a person are worse than winning a radio contest before they switched to text. My 8 hours of call logs prove it.

I am tempted to make a Twilio script. If call dropped, redial, else connect human. I bet you that's how these services operate.

> For the week that ended on May 15, EDD received 5.12 million calls from 378,146 unique callers

Something is horribly broken if customers need to call them 13 times per week.

> Both automatically dial and redial EDD until they reach the agency’s hold line. Then they call a client and patch them through to wait on hold with EDD. The companies both said they then disconnect from the call so they do not overhear personal information.

How does that work? If they disconnect the call ends since they are the originator doesn't it?

Sorry for the awkward editorializing -- the article title exceeded the HN cap. If anyone's able to manually adjust it I'd appreciate it.

Isn't EDD fraud rampant though? Legitimate claimants don't get benefits, criminals do?