Many part-timers shut out of jobless benefits in tough times

Annie Frodeman often worked 40 hours a week or more — full time by most measures. She just worked them at two jobs.

Four or five mornings a week before the coronavirus outbreak, she worked as an airport ramp agent for Piedmont Airlines in Burlington, Vermont — hoisting bags on and off planes, refilling the water tank, and sometimes emptying aircraft lavatories — for less than $15 an hour. The rest of the time she signed up for shifts in the emergency room at University of Vermont Medical Center, registering patients for $20 an hour.

While Burlington is expensive, Frodeman said, the two jobs together provided the income and flexibility she needed to pay her bills while attending graduate school part-time. But once the pandemic hit, shifts dried up.

The airline furloughed her. She hoped to make up the hours at the hospital, but soon her 35- to 45-hour weeks there were cut to a single eight- or four-hour shift.

“Last week I didn’t get anything,” she said.

Having multiple jobs is business as usual for millions of Americans. But many cobbled-together employment arrangements that enabled people to get by when the jobless rate was skimming along at record lows collapsed once the pandemic curbed or closed large swaths of the economy.

The economic shock quickly exposed the mismatch between the reality of making a living in 2020 America and the systems built to protect workers. People who rely on paychecks from different employers are already more likely to have shifting schedules and unpredictable weekly paychecks, low hourly wages and the absence of benefits like sick days and health insurance. They are also more likely to be Black, young and without a college degree.

And when hard times hit, they are excluded from regular state unemployment benefits.

“There’s a misfit between the enormous volatility and part-time jobs that make up the ways that people cobble together making money and the system that’s going to cut you a check,” said Susan Lambert, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies low-skilled hourly jobs. “The rules of the game have changed,” she said, but protections for workers, like jobless benefits or laws that require advance notice of schedule changes and extra compensation for last-minute switches, have not caught up.

When economic shutdowns began rolling through the country, Congress focused on the existing unemployment insurance system as the primary vehicle for assistance. Lawmakers moved quickly to fill in some of the holes and created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, a temporary benefit for the ranks of freelancers and part-timers, as well as contract, self-employed and gig workers, who are ineligible for normal state benefits.

The emergency federal program, which expires at the end of the year, provided a lifeline for millions of people, but it has struggled with a slow rollout and complicated rules, as well as overburdened administrators and computers. Organized fraud has further bedeviled the process.

Frodeman, who applied in May, still has not received her first check. Fortunately, she said, her furlough at Piedmont ended and she picked up 14 hours a week at the airport.

She and her fiance had been putting away money for their wedding, so they have a cushion.

“But I do wonder what happens to people in my position who don’t have the money we saved for our wedding,” she said.