Speaker 1: It's Tuesday, jo I'm Oscar and Mirrors from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is Reopening America.
Speaker 1: The reopening of America has not been going so well
Speaker 1: just yet. While some gains have been made, a resurgence
Speaker 1: of cases and delays and unemployment benefits have continued to
Speaker 1: push people to the edge. There are issues with fraud
Speaker 1: and user confusion, long waits to process jobless applications, and
Speaker 1: outdated computer systems used by unemployment offices. Eli Rosenberg, work
Speaker 1: and labor reporter at the Washington Post, joins us for more.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, Eli, Thanks so much for having
Speaker 1: me as we continue to make our way through the
Speaker 1: coronavirus pandemic. One lifeline that a lot of people have
Speaker 1: had has been unemployment benefits. Obviously, Congress past a bunch
Speaker 1: of things to help make that a little more robust.
Speaker 1: People are getting an extra six hundred dollars for their payments,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot of other people who have just
Speaker 1: been kind of left in the lurch with all of this.
Speaker 1: There's been huge delay. People have gone by weeks and
Speaker 1: months without getting payments or even a callback sometimes from
Speaker 1: their local unemployment offices. It's been a pretty hard time
Speaker 1: for a lot of people. ELI tell us a little
Speaker 1: bit about what's going on with unemployment. So many of
Speaker 1: us know by now that just flood of people out
Speaker 1: there have lost their work in the last couple of
Speaker 1: months because of pandemic, and that sent a ton of
Speaker 1: people applying for unemployment insurance from their state agencies. You
Speaker 1: have more than somewhere in the range of fifty million
Speaker 1: people apply for unemployment insurance at some point during this crisis,
Speaker 1: and currently about eighteen million people continuing receiving benefits. So
Speaker 1: that flood of applicants has created a huge amount of
Speaker 1: challenges for these state agencies that are not used to
Speaker 1: that level of applications or really anything close to that,
Speaker 1: And for a lot of workers out there, this has
Speaker 1: been issue since the beginning of the pandemic. There's been
Speaker 1: some pretty significant delays that states have been slowly working
Speaker 1: through and getting better at. But as we reported today,
Speaker 1: there's still some folks out there who've been waiting a month,
Speaker 1: two months or longer to get their unemployment better fits
Speaker 1: and struggling to just take care of their basic needs
Speaker 1: and bills in the meantime. Yeah, and unfortunately you know,
Speaker 1: we are reopening a lot of the states, but there's
Speaker 1: surging cases, so that's a problem there. And then, as
Speaker 1: you noted in your article, there's tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: workers at Levi's, Wells Fargo, and United Airlines who learned
Speaker 1: that they could be getting furloughed or laid off in
Speaker 1: the coming months. So this whole thing is not over yet.
Speaker 1: With that respect, one thing I noted in your article.
Speaker 1: You mentioned that there's a lot of issues with fraud
Speaker 1: and user confusion over the new rules and filing processes.
Speaker 1: This has helped bog down the whole process. What kind
Speaker 1: of fraud and user confusion are we looking at states
Speaker 1: around the country. I've been dealing with a level of
Speaker 1: fraud in terms of applications submitted for these unemployment claims.
Speaker 1: I think that's something that typically happens in general, and
Speaker 1: now with the flood of applicants, perhaps have been done
Speaker 1: a slightly higher level than normal. So the normal work
Speaker 1: to kind of verify that applicants are who they say
Speaker 1: they are, that their personal information, their social security information
Speaker 1: hasn't been compromised. It is just so much harder because
Speaker 1: there's so many more of them out there. So that's
Speaker 1: just another issue which adds to the complicating factors of
Speaker 1: getting these applications through the system that you have to
Speaker 1: verify that they're all legitimate. So we've heard some reports
Speaker 1: about people getting their claims flag for fraud even though
Speaker 1: they're legitimate claims. Is that assign of the system working
Speaker 1: legitimately just sort of normal speed bumps on the road
Speaker 1: to getting your insurance process, probably, but just with the
Speaker 1: level of applications we're seeing out there, it's something that
Speaker 1: makes a process even slower than it already is for
Speaker 1: some people. The backlog is pretty bad. One of the
Speaker 1: stats you had in the article. By the end of May,
Speaker 1: about eighteen point eight million out of thirty three million
Speaker 1: claims just about had been paid out nationwide, So there's
Speaker 1: still a lot of people that were still waiting to
Speaker 1: get through the process. One question I had about that,
Speaker 1: do there's people that you know are waiting, let's say
Speaker 1: they're weeks or maybe even a month into the process.
Speaker 1: Do they get paid what they should have gotten paid
Speaker 1: from when they first applied, or do they just get
Speaker 1: paid you know, the last two weeks. How does that work?
Speaker 1: We're hearing some different things. One thing that makes this
Speaker 1: kind of tricky to track is that the federal government
Speaker 1: at least doesn't track or released statistics about sort of
Speaker 1: how many claims of getting the country. But like you said,
Speaker 1: large number eighteen million out of about thirty three million
Speaker 1: had been processed, leaving more than twelve million claims that
Speaker 1: we're still needing processing at the end of May. So
Speaker 1: for some folks those delays are pretty significant. What about
Speaker 1: denied claims? There was a section you had about Oklahoma
Speaker 1: having approved two thirty five thousand out of about five
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety thousand claims, but they had a big
Speaker 1: number three hundred and fifty thousand claims that they denied.
Speaker 1: How is that working out? We weren't able to get
Speaker 1: the model of that for this story. The state of
Speaker 1: Oklahoma said that there's a new type of unemployment insurance
Speaker 1: available to self employed workers and gig workers, and to
Speaker 1: get that insurance, they have to first apply for regular
Speaker 1: unemployment insurance, get denied, and then apply for the second
Speaker 1: type of insurance that they're eligible for. So they were
Speaker 1: saying that a large number of those claims are due
Speaker 1: to people having to get denied to apply to the
Speaker 1: PUA insurance. What it's called for gig workers, but only
Speaker 1: forty seven thousand people I think applied to the PUA
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma, so that's only about a seventh out of
Speaker 1: that three. So again, just trying to figure out what's
Speaker 1: happening with people out there, how long they're waiting, whether
Speaker 1: they're getting their benefits back, and just to kind of
Speaker 1: piggyback on the question you asked before, we've heard all
Speaker 1: sorts of different things. We've heard some people waiting six weeks,
Speaker 1: eight weeks and then kindly getting on the lump sumb
Speaker 1: for some people waiting a long time and only getting
Speaker 1: the past couple of weeks. We're not getting all of
Speaker 1: the employment insurance if they work multiple jobs that they
Speaker 1: think they're owed, but also being so sort of frustrated
Speaker 1: with the system at that process that they're happy to
Speaker 1: just be getting some money after not getting any. So
Speaker 1: it's not exactly clear whether or not people are getting
Speaker 1: paid out for all those benefits they missed. When they
Speaker 1: do get paid out, it's just such an unfortunate thing
Speaker 1: when so many people need the help. No one knew
Speaker 1: that the coronavirus pandemic was and it hit so hard,
Speaker 1: but we knew that this crush of job losses was
Speaker 1: going to hit. So that's kind of a tough thing
Speaker 1: to square away. And one thing that we always hear
Speaker 1: about is just kind of the outdated systems. I know,
Speaker 1: the computers are a big thing. Oklahoma just going on
Speaker 1: with them. I think they said they have an old
Speaker 1: mainframe computer from night and they have like full time
Speaker 1: staff just dedicated to making sure that thing doesn't crap out. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, these are just all the difficulties that these
Speaker 1: unemployment officers are dealing with, as you mentioned too, while
Speaker 1: they're just getting crushed with more and more claims. We
Speaker 1: sort of say that it's a confluence of crises right
Speaker 1: in the article, and one of those is the unprecedent
Speaker 1: ended volume claim. But one of those is the years
Speaker 1: of neglect and lack of funding and budgets being paired
Speaker 1: down in these state unemployment agencies. Pretty crazy right now,
Speaker 1: Did any office, state or private will be using a
Speaker 1: mainframe computer from the ninth teen seventies. One thing that
Speaker 1: did make it into the story was we were talking
Speaker 1: to the agency and the state of Oregon that deals
Speaker 1: with unemployment insurance, and they too said that the computer
Speaker 1: they relied on was fifty years old, so I asked
Speaker 1: him if that menu it was from nineteen seventy. They
Speaker 1: didn't have an exact date, but apparently it might even
Speaker 1: be even older than Oklahoma's main frame. So yeah, a
Speaker 1: system that's not been functioning well or set up to
Speaker 1: succeed now being really challenged in a way that it's
Speaker 1: not prepared for. Eli Rosenberg, work and labor reporter at
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, Thank you very much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been reopening America.
Speaker 1: Don't forget after today's big news stories. You can check
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