Preliminary settlement reached in Ga. labor suit
A preliminary agreement has been reached between the Georgia Department of Labor and attorneys who filed a class action suit aimed at pushing the department to speed up its handling of jobless claims and questions from claimants, federal court documents show.
The deal, set to be finalized Sept. 1, pending court approval, calls for the DOL to improve its communications systems and eliminate remaining backlogs by the end of the year, according to attorneys for the Southern Poverty Law Center and Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore. The law groups filed the suit on behalf of people waiting for claims or appeals to be resolved after the department was overwhelmed during the pandemic.
“COVID-19 broke the Georgia unemployment system,” said Jason Carter, a partner at Bondurant, Mixson.
“These new systems should provide timely information to claimants, reduce the number of chokepoints, and help ensure that the system won’t break again.”
In a press release, SPLC and the Bondurant firm said when the suit was originally filed in 2021, “hundreds of thousands of people were waiting for their unemployment claims to be processed or an appeal to be heard.”
Mark Butler, the state’s Labor Commissioner, said that the deal comes with many of the system improvements already underway. He emphasized that the agreement is still preliminary.
And he blasted Carter for making “false and misleading” assertions about the “proposed settlement” and GDOL.
“At no time in 2021 did the Department have hundreds of thousands of people waiting for their unemployment claims to be processed or an appeal to be heard,” Butler said in a statement. “GDOL was already making the improvements to its systems mentioned, before the lawsuit was even filed, but we were willing to consider feedback from their clients if it improved the customer experience. We’re disappointed that they chose to issue a statement disparaging the Department rather than continuing to work with us on this common goal.”
Carter said his group’s statements were based on statements DOL officials made.
“I don’t know why they feel like this is a fight,” he said. “We settled the case, we reached an agreement and we think it’s a good outcome for people.”
The suit was originally filed in Fulton County Superior Court, then transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, which is based in Atlanta.
The department was bitterly criticized during the pandemic when it was overwhelmed by an unprecedented number of unemployment claims and the need to embrace and manage a number of new federal programs.
Last week, the department received 4,024 new initial claims for jobless benefits.
The department went into the pandemic with far fewer employees than during the previous recession and with technology the agency itself has admitted was not ready for a tsunami of claims. DOL also had to grapple with protecting its workforce from COVID-19.
To protect staffers and claimants alike, the department closed its work centers around the state as the crisis mounted.
As a result, jobless Georgians often suffered through excruciatingly long delays in getting their claims handled and payments made, while claimants with questions often found it impossible to reach DOL staffers by phone or email.