Accident ended a career, started a bureaucratic nightmare
Tim is 66 years old and, like so many others, he’s in the midst of a rotten year. A serious injury, the termination of his longtime job, and an attempt to navigate the state bureaucracy during a pandemic make 2020 a time he’d just as soon forget.
In truth, some of what happened this year is a haze for Tim.
His troubles started at twilight on July 17. Tim was pedaling his bicycle toward a bank on St. Michael’s Drive. He intended to deposit money from the retail store where he’d worked for 22 years.
“I was a short distance from the bank. I don’t remember what happened then,” Tim said.
An accident ended his ride and his job.
Tim received a concussion that put him in a hospital for two days. Doctors also found bleeding in his brain.
More recently, his right leg swelled, and doctors last week discovered a blood clot in his thigh.
A police report provides no details about the accident or how Tim was injured.
Because he was performing a job assignment when the accident happened, he qualified for worker’s compensation insurance of about $500 a week. He received these payments from September through November.
Tim’s employer terminated his job and his medical insurance Sept. 30, during his recovery from the bike accident.
On one level, Tim said, he understood that decision, heartbreaking though it was. He worked in a small shop and the owner had to keep it running. The owner did not return my message seeking comment about Tim’s firing.
Tim applied for unemployment benefits on Sept. 4. Three months later, on Dec. 4, Tim had heard nothing from the state Department of Workforce Solutions.
Not only was the status of his claim a mystery, he had difficulty getting anyone from the agency on the phone. One short conversation was polite, but it yielded no useful information for Tim.
A friend of Tim’s wrote to me last week, upset that Workforce Solutions says it determines eligibility for jobless benefits in four to six weeks.
“He has been waiting over 12 weeks to either receive a payment, a request for additional information or a determination. As you might infer, he has not been contacted or begun to receive compensation,” Tim’s friend stated in his note.
I asked Bill McCamley, Cabinet secretary of the Department of Workforce Solutions, about the delay in Tim’s case.
“Three months is a long time. That shouldn’t happen,” McCamley said.
McCamley assigned one of his staff members to expedite a decision on Tim’s claim. The inquiry began last weekend and was ongoing Tuesday.
I should make clear that McCamley didn’t react because a columnist questioned him about one of the 119,000 unemployment claims his department is handling.
“Whenever we hear about these exceptional examples of people not receiving information, I get personally involved,” McCamley said.
The caseload at Workforce Solutions was about 10,000 before the novel coronavirus pandemic. Now, with almost 12 times that many claims, snags or backlogs occur in perhaps 5 percent of applications, McCamley said.
Still, he said, one delayed response is one too many.
McCamley declined to comment on particulars of Tim’s case, saying he could not discuss it with a third party.
Tim said he received an email Tuesday from McCamley. It centered on Tim supplying additional information about the worker’s compensation benefits he collected.
Tim doesn’t know why this issue wasn’t flagged when he applied for unemployment, if Workforce Solutions had questions about it.
He checked his online account with Workforce Solutions each week. In doing so, he made sure all requested information was correct.
A caseworker also contacted Tim after McCamley ordered a review of the case. Tim said this helped him better understand an application that he found “fuzzy” in its directions and even bogged down with misspellings.
McCamley said he knows certain cases have been mishandled.
“I’m not going to tell you we’re perfect. We’re not,” he said.
But, he added, 70 percent of unemployment cases are being processed in three weeks or less. Most of the rest are handled in the agency’s listed turnaround time of four to six weeks.
The numbers look even better when one considers employers have two weeks to verify the statements from applicants on how much money they were making.
“Since the pandemic, I’m really proud of our staff,” McCamley said.
Tim knows all about dedication to a job. After he was released from a hospital in July, a friend drove him to the bank so he could deposit the money he’d been carrying at the time of his accident.
That was Tim’s last act for his old employer. He hopes there will be an encore performance.
A job would put an end to the headache of trying for unemployment benefits.
Ringside Seat is an opinion column about people, politics and news. Contact Milan Simonich at msimonich@sfnewmexican.com or 505-986-3080.