| I was laid off on Nov. 18. That day, I applied for unemployment benefits, and also did the required online check-in the following week.
As I went to claim benefits online this morning, I was logged in, then told:
You may not claim your weekly benefits using this system until you call the Telephone Claims Center at 1-888-209-8124 and request credit for your waiting week.
The phone call is, naturally, voice-mail-hell -- eight screens, and none of them allowed me to request credit for the waiting week.
Which should be redundant anyway, since I made a complete claim, it was validated, and that claim obviously included "requesting credit" for the waiting week.
Back to voice-mail-hell, when you finally, after three or four minutes, get to where you need to be to talk to a human being, you are told to call back later since:
"We are experiencing a high volume of calls at this time and all specialists are busy with other customers."
The machine did say it was sorry, anyway.
Perhaps the most infuriating part of this voice-mail-hell is that three times the machine encourages you to go to the website -- which cannot resolve the weirdly-created problem.
After spending an hour trying to connect with a person this morning, I gave up and called my assemblyman's office.
Cheryl at Ron Canestrari's office commiserated and said she'd look into it.
(She did, and said that the Labor Department will be "very liberal" in dealing with people who have problems like mine, and that someone from the department will be calling me. Whew!, for me, but what about other unfortunates? She also said that the department will be hiring more people to answer phones.)
I then called a local Labor Department office, was told that calling the number is the only way, and that someone she knew had spent three days on the phone to get through.
THREE DAYS!?
It got worse when I called a friend who works for another local assemblyman, who told me she had someone come into her office who waited six weeks for his check because he could not get through the obviously inadequate voice-mail-hell system. (He avoided homelessness because he was living with his parents.)
SIX WEEKS!?
So, after posting this here and at Daily Kos, and calling a few reporters and labor types I know, I'll be spending untold hours trying to access this lousy system and avoid losing a week's benefits.
In a conspiracy-theory moment, it came to me that making unemployment harder to get may be a feature, not a bug.
New York is in a severe fiscal crisis, and must be saving lots of money through its unemployment jerk-around system.
With about 525,000 unemployed in the state, making, say, 10 percent of them lose a week because the system rewards with timely payments only those with the time and patience to spend days in voice-mail-hell makes perverse fiscal sense.
Especially when some who do spend all week calling may not get through.
So, if the average benefit check is $300, multiply that by 52,500, and you get $15.75 million.
That's hypothetical, but even if only part of it is fact, it provides an incentive for the state to screw some people in their time of intense need.
Especially when unemployment is expected to grow for the foreseeable future, and make getting through on the phone even harder.
And, I must add, New York has a Democratic governor, who is ultimately responsible for the performance of state agencies.
I like and support David Paterson -- he's done a good job so far in recognizing, and dealing with, how the Bush recession and the financial industry meltdown will affect state government.
But Paterson MUST do something to resolve this problem at the Labor Department, because screwing newly unemployed people and/or making them jump through ridiculous voice-mail-hell hoops is not a Democratic value.
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