Hundreds waiting on unemployment
Claims filed in March, April remain unanswered
Christopher Morse has gone nearly six months without a paycheck, thanks to COVID-19.
Morse, 36, is a student at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay studying business, and until six months ago, he was working two jobs. He was saving up in preparation to marry his fianceé and buy a house, he said. He put in a lot of hours, interning for Schreiber Foods and driving for a pizza shop, but he didn’t mind, he said. He’s always liked working.
Then in March, things changed. He got COVID-19 while working at his delivery job. After having to take some time off to recover and keep others safe from the virus, he found the business had already replaced him. Not soon after, his internship ended. He filed for unemployment on April 4.
Since then, he’s heard from an adjudicator assigned to his case once. He’s called the unemployment line, run by the Department of Workforce Development. But no one has been able to tell him when he’ll start getting payments.
“I thought they’d have answers by now,” he said.
In the time since he applied for unemployment, Morse has gotten married.
His parents, who live in Alabama, got sick with COVID-19. His mom is recovering, he said, but his dad succumbed to the virus. It’s all added to the stress of not being able to pay his credit card bills or make car payments, he said.
“They said I just have to be patient,” he said. “And I want to be patient. But I started in April with this claim and now it’s September. I’m behind on so many things.”
The department predicted in June that the backlog would be handled by August, but some Wisconsinites are still faced with a similar situation: no income as they battle their way through the coronavirus pandemic.
Where Wisconsin stands
As of Aug. 29, the Department of Workforce Development had received 6.15 million weekly claims and had paid 5.46 million of those claims, according to a release.
More than 685,000 claims still hadn’t been paid out and remained in adjudication. The week before, ending in Aug. 22, there were nearly 672,000 claims waiting on adjudication. More than 712,000 weekly claims have been denied.
Ben Jedd, the communications specialist for the department, said they’re still working through the backlog that began with a mountain of claims in March, April and May, though the vast majority of the earliest claims have been cleared.
Because the department didn’t have enough staff to handle the hundreds of thousands of claims that came in due to the coronavirus pandemic, it had to vet, hire and onboard more than a thousand new staff members. That process, Jedd said, took months to complete.
Jedd did not give an estimate for when the backlog of claims would be gone.
Like the rest of the country, Wisconsin residents lost the extra $600 provided by the CARES Act at the end of July, leaving most recipients of unemployment with only the standard state-level benefits, ranging between $100 and $370 per week.
A federal order, signed by President Donald Trump, will provide an extra $300 a week to unemployed Americans dating back to Aug. 1, but that program provides money for three weeks, with states having to apply for additional weeks of funding for the benefit after that. It is unclear how long those benefits will last.
‘There are still people waiting’
Though Jerrion Shell was approved for his unemployment payments recently, he endured more than five months of waiting for money to hit his account, he said.
Before the pandemic, Shell was working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Rwanda, teaching English. The Corps pulled everyone out of their stations when it became clear how big of an issue COVID-19 was going to be. Shell ended up back in America.
He had previously lived in Milwaukee and worked full time for the Milwaukee Public Schools system, as well as part time at the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee and YMCA of Metropolitan Milwaukee. But when he came back, he moved to Illinois to be closer to family.
Shell applied for unemployment in early April and heard from an adjudicator within two weeks, he said. But his wait was far from over.
“The first month went by, then a month and a half and two months,” he said.
He started calling the department, but he couldn’t get an answer from the agents who answered the phones. He had to apply for food stamps to feed himself in the meantime, he said, and relied on family for help with other things.
“Luckily I had family to fall back on, but it gets to the point where you don’t want to be a burden,” he said. “Sometimes it came down to ‘Do I get an oil change or put gas in my car? Which do I need more? Do I pay my telephone or my credit card?’ ”
The most frustrating part for Shell was seeing others get approved immediately after filing while he continued to wait for months. It was disheartening,
“There are still people who have been waiting since March,” he said.
Stephanie Hibbler of Milwaukee is one of those people. She applied for unemployment on March 13 after losing her job as an administrative assistant at the Tripoli Shrine Center. She has been without income since then, taking care of her three boys.
“I think the state should go back to the longest waiting,” she said. “I know someone who just applied sometime last week and is already seeing updates on their case.”
According to Jedd, most of the cases from the early months of the pandemic have been addressed, with 96% of claims between March 15 and May 2 having been completed.
Of all the claims that have come in since the coronavirus struck Wisconsin, 89% have been handled, either with payment, adjudication or denial. He said the department is working through claims in the order they come in, but that some claims are more difficult than others, requiring more work to verify complicated employment histories.
But even with a large number of cases from the early days of the pandemic having been processed, there are still 452 people waiting on their March filings to be adjudicated by the department, according to a Sept. 1 letter from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau sent to Sen. André Jacque, R-De Pere. A reason for the delay in handling those claims was not listed.
Jacque said that his office has been working with more than 370 constituents, trying to figure out delays in payments. He said it’s frustrating to have to watch people in need of aid go through these long wait times.
“We’ve been connecting a lot of folks to emergency resources in the community to try to get them through, but it’s a real hardship for people and a real strain on those community resources,” he said.
Jacque said that something needs to be done to help people, whether tapping other state agencies to help or assigning more employees to only work on the backlog.
Shell wants to know what Wisconsin, even though he no longer lives here, is going to do to help those people caught in the backlog. He wants to see more action from the department and Gov. Tony Evers, maybe even a task force that looks exclusively at claims from May, April and May.
“They only want to speak to cases they’re able to approve, but there’s a backlog that y’all are not talking about,” he said. “Let’s talk about how it got this way and continues to stay this way. It seems they want to avoid talking about the backlog.”
Morse agreed.
“They need to just admit there’s a problem with unemployment,” he said.