Before Covid-19 hit Vermont, Wayne Woodard built houses for a living. But in March 2020, like thousands of other Vermonters, he lost his job, and applied for state unemployment insurance.
“We struggled and struggled to even get signed up for it,” Woodard said. “And then it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Then it started finally getting to us, but we started getting behind on bills.”
After a year of pandemic, Woodard said, things have only gotten worse. He said he can never count on his checks coming in the mail, and when they do arrive, they’re usually days or weeks late.
Automatic payments he’d set up to pay his bills have come out of his account before he’s received the money to pay for them, Woodard said. He’s been drowning in overdraft fees. One day, he got so far behind that he lost his car and phone.
“When you lose your income, you lose everything,” he said. “All your things, everything that you have done in your life you’ll lose, and eventually you’ll lose it all. You need money to pay your bills, and nowadays, there’s nothing that’s free.”
Now, he’s just trying to keep his lights on — which he said got a little easier once he didn’t have phone and car payments every month.
“We’re living right down to the bare bones now as it is, so we don’t get any more bills,” he said. “We’ve still got power but a lot of things have hit us hard. Other folks too, I’m sure.”
In 2020, the Vermont Department of Labor received more than 138,000 initial unemployment claims filed by Vermonters. In total, over 1.9 million continued claims were filed throughout the year, totaling over $1.3 billion paid in benefits.
Labor Commissioner Michael Harrington said that by design most of those claimants are receiving less from unemployment than they earned on the job, to encourage people to return to work.
But because of the difference between pre-pandemic wages and unemployment earnings, thousands of Vermonters are struggling to fill in the gaps — which is even trickier when they’re not sure when those checks will arrive.
‘Then my claim got stuck’
Mandy Spaulding lost her job as a lawyer in March 2020. That month she was also selected for jury duty, her dad’s cancer came back, a family member in addiction recovery relapsed — and she got really sick. Spaulding wasn’t able to get a Covid test at the time but suspects that’s what she had. So she did the one thing she could do, in spite of everything: applied for unemployment.
“And then my claim got stuck in the ether for over eight weeks,” she said. Nor did Spaulding receive her federal stimulus checks. She has no idea why. But she was determined to get another job.
“I looked for work. I applied for probably every state of Vermont job that pays over $15 an hour,” she said. “Even though I’m an attorney, I applied for 911 dispatcher, everything under the sun, and I couldn’t get anything.”
Spaulding said when she was working she made $900 a week, but because of self-employment expenses that are tax writeoffs, what she shows as income is a lot less than that. So she received only about $200 a week in unemployment — not even a quarter of the income that she was used to earning.
“It basically paid for our groceries and diapers,” she said. “And I don’t have anybody really in my community that had to go through this, so added to the whole isolation and feeling like a crazy person, nobody else was around to commiserate with.”
‘You’re relying on somebody else’
Spaulding’s experience with unemployment is far from unique.
“I hate this,” said Diane Balas Pawlick, who was laid off from her restaurant job when the pandemic began. “You’re relying on somebody else for your money to come in every week. And you can’t rely on it. There’s some weeks still that we don’t get a check. You put in your claim and you have to worry all week whether or not you’re going to get a check. I’d rather be working, so my money is right there at the end of the week.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, Pawlick was one of the lucky few who received unemployment checks right away. But one day, she said, the money stopped coming. For four months, Pawlick didn’t receive a cent from the state. During that time, she had only four hours per week at her old restaurant job and had to use up her entire life savings to get by.
“I was able to pay my bills, which is something that a lot of people haven’t been able to do,” she said. “My rent is all paid up, and my utilities and everything, so I was able to do all of that, but it wiped out my savings completely.”
“I can understand it more at the beginning, when all these people started filing for unemployment, that they were overwhelmed,” she said of the labor department. “But now, they’ve had a year to figure it all out, and it’s still happening. It’s maddening.”
‘Awful frustrating is what it is’
Woodard said he’s called the labor department “hundreds of times” to ask about missing or late payments, hardly ever getting through to anyone, and even less frequently finding the help he’s seeking.
In May, Woodard got a $1,200 stimulus check — right when it was due. But in January, when the additional $600 was supposed to arrive, his check never came. He’s confident he will get that money once he files his federal income taxes, but he said that because of a labor department 1099 form glitch in January he hasn’t received the information he needs to file his taxes.
He figures the money he was counting on in January won’t arrive until March.
“Awful frustrating is what it is,” he said. “You call to get people to talk to you, and you can’t talk to nobody and you can’t do anything. They just don’t have the time or don’t care or are too busy, it seems like. And they don’t call you back.”
Woodard has COPD — a lung condition that is known to increase the risk of severe illness from Covid-19. So even if he could find another job, showing up at work would carry a pretty high risk.
“I mean, it is what it is, and you can’t change it, you just get used to it,” he said. “Everybody’s got issues during this pandemic.”
