By Nigel Duara, Cal Matters, November 25, 2020
In late 2017, a house fell on Jacques Gene.
The construction foreman in Cool, east of Sacramento, was inside a half-finished home when the rolling trusses that make up the underside of the roof fell, collapsing the whole house. Gene, 46, suffered broken ribs, a punctured lung and a concussion. When his coworkers sorted through the rubble, he says, they didn’t expect to find him alive.
But he found work again, earning $70,000 annually as a foreman to support his wife, their two kids and two children from a previous marriage. Then the pandemic hit and work dried up. Gene exhausted his state unemployment benefits and relied on Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation payments to survive until those, too, ran out.
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