NEW YORK Biking in the rain, Jose “Manny” Ramirez dodges cars and pedestrians on the busy streets of Manhattan. He rushes from McDonald’s to an elderly couple, from the South Bronx to the Upper East Side, and then back again.
New York State was rightly celebrated for its 2021 $2.1 billion dollar Excluded Worker Fund (EWF), providing direct payments to essential, low-income, immigrant workers and their families who had suffered economic loss due to the pandemic but were excluded from some federal pandemic relief efforts, including unemployment insurance and payments from the federal CARES Act.