WASHINGTON — The nation is seeing increased traffic in retail shops and restaurants, with the latest report showing 916,000 people have gone back to work since February.

But in California, while rates have also improved, hundreds of thousands of people are still without a job. It doesn’t help that the unemployment systems are also backed up and mired in scandal, mostly attributed to antiquated systems and untrained personnel. California’s “antiquated” unemployment system has paid out anywhere between $11 and $30 billion worth of benefits that involve fraud.

Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said the administration is working on helping the state.

"We’re going to have those conversations now," said Walsh. "We’re having them now about how do we help states all across America."

Walsh said President Joe Biden has included a $2 billion investment into the UI system in his infrastructure plan, also known as the American Jobs Plan. The former Boston mayor admitted the need for a better unemployment system nationwide.

"It’s not just California," said Walsh. "There are many other states that have problems with the UI. Even in the very beginning, my own state of Massachusetts, the amount of claims that came in at one time was overwhelming for the folks there in the city of Boston."

National Farmworker Awareness Week was last week. Up to half of all farmworkers in America reside in California which is anywhere between 500 and 800,000 people. The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division launched a nationwide education, outreach, and enforcement initiative to ensure workplace protections for these front line workers.

"My mother and father grew up in Ireland on a farm," said Walsh. "They didn’t have the same type of farms that we’re seeing here. They had farms to raise their own families, and many of the farmworkers in America are working and raising a family. And we need to make sure they’re paid fairly and treated fairly, and we need to do everything we can, and that’s going to be one of our focuses here at the DOL to make sure that all workers, not just farmworkers, but all workers in America are treated fairly."

There are still over 8 million jobs to go before the labor market reverts back to how it was a year ago. Among these statistics, women have been disproportionally forced out of the workforce, according to The Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress.

Walsh explained that the administration is now “laser-focused” on women and people of color.

"We saw a little bit of closing gap between men and women in this latest report, but in the American Jobs plan, there is money in there for job training, for apprentice programs, but also the care economy, and that’s something for child care, and for schools," said Walsh. "So all of that helps us rebound."

Ultimately, he said, recovery will depend on vaccination rates.

“The more vaccines we can get into people and still continue to wear masks and physical distance and take care of ourselves, we will see encouraging signs moving forward. If we don’t do that, then I can’t, I don’t want to make an estimate of what we’re going to see next month."

Walsh added that with the uptick in COVID-19 cases, it’s hard to predict whether the positive pace of economic recovery will continue.