Laura Giles needs to pay her bills.
The Colchester resident lost her job at a grocery store last June and has been relying on Pandemic Unemployment Assistance to stay afloat. At the start of April, she suddenly stopped receiving benefits under the program.
Giles said she received a notice that month from the Vermont Department of Labor saying she was no longer eligible for PUA. When she called the labor department, though, a staffer told her a department glitch was to blame for that determination, and she would actually keep receiving payments.
More than a month has passed since that call. Giles has filed a new PUA claim every week, she said. Benefits for each of those weeks have yet to arrive in her bank account.
Giles estimated she’s called the labor department 16 times to ask if the glitch has been resolved. Each time, department staffers tell her that she’s not the only one experiencing delays in benefit payments.
They urge her to be patient, Giles said.
“And I’m a patient person. But it’s been five weeks, and I have car payments. I have bills,” Giles said. “I feel lost, like I’m hanging in limbo.”
The thousands of Vermonters who lost jobs during the pandemic have faced myriad challenges. But for those who have been laid off, trying to get financial help from Vermont’s state government has posed its own set of obstacles during the yearlong public health crisis.
VTDigger spoke with a dozen unemployed Vermonters who described having to “jump through hoops” to obtain unemployment benefits, as one claimant put it.
The obstacles that began last spring have persisted, leading some lawmakers and labor advocates to call for reforms in the state’s unemployment insurance system.
Challenges include hours-long wait times on calls to the department, and being shuffled repeatedly among staff without receiving answers to questions about their claims.
Some claimants described waiting months for determinations on benefits claims that had been sent to adjudication or that they had submitted for appeals — periods when some struggled to put food on the table.
The number of claims filed with the labor department surged 18-fold in the first month after Covid-19 entered Vermont: Just under 5,000 Vermonters were claiming benefits as of March 14, 2020, according to Labor Commissioner Michael Harrington. Six weeks later, that number reached 90,000.
The agency has made every effort to get benefits on time to laid-off Vermonters, Harrington said. But with an ailing 50-year-old mainframe computer that houses the department’s claims database and a dearth of federal money in the face of rising department costs, Harrington acknowledged the agency has struggled to keep up.
“I think it gets lost sometimes that, while there’s a feeling that we’ve turned the corner on the pandemic, we as a department are still managing a claims load that’s 10 times higher than we typically would manage,” Harrington said in an interview Wednesday. “And we’re managing this on a patchwork system. Every day, there’s a fire to put out.”
Overwhelmed and underwater
Vermont’s unemployment pipeline is not the only one clogged during the once-in-a-century pandemic.
The problem was especially pronounced last spring. For every 10 people across the country who succeeded in lining up unemployment benefits in the first month of the pandemic, five to six more either tried and were unable to file a claim, or did not try to apply because it seemed too difficult, according to a study by the Washington, D.C-based Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
The challenges never went away. As of last fall, at least 35 states’ labor departments were still reporting persistent problems in delivering unemployment insurance payments.
The primary issue, labor department officials say, is volume. In Vermont, more than 33,000 people got unemployment benefits in March 2021 — more than six times the number just before the pandemic, according to labor department data.
The department has hired call center employees, some of them located outside of Vermont, to accommodate the crush of phone inquiries. That approach was necessary because of the explosion of claims over the past year, Harrington said.
But when inexperienced staffers are confronted with questions about unemployment insurance, they may not have the answers, he acknowledged.
“What I see is that many times the agent who’s trying to resolve the issue is in fact making a good-faith effort to resolve the issue,” Harrington said. “But it really takes a trained eye, or a seasoned individual, to actually get at what is holding this claim up.”
Technology has been at the root of the department’s struggles during the pandemic, he said.
“I know it sounds like we fall back on that a lot, and it’s not just to say that it’s solely a mainframe problem,” the commissioner said. “It’s also the fact that the federal government implemented so many different programs that all are being managed separately, that don’t easily transfer information from one another.”
Each of the Vermonters who spoke to VTDigger for this story acknowledged the tremendous strain that the agency’s staff has been under during the pandemic.
“We recognize the labor department has had serious hurdles to get over, and that there are really good people who are working hard to try to solve these problems,” said Kelli Kazmarski, a Vermont Legal Aid staff lawyer who represents claimants in appeals cases. “At the very same time, people are still having serious issues getting vital benefits that they seem to be eligible for.”
Kazmarski has observed particularly long hangups in the department’s adjudication and appeals process, she said.
Some Vermonters whose claims are directed to adjudication — a secondary vetting process in which a labor department employee with additional expertise reviews a claim — are waiting months before getting their results. Other applicants who appeal the decision on their unemployment claims are waiting months for hearings to be scheduled, Kazmarski said.
Those wait times can lead to desperation for people who lost their income.
“Disruptions in streams of income are a serious problem when most people are living paycheck to paycheck,” Kazmarski said.
Harrington said the department has recently been able to cut wait times for adjudications and appeals on claims. The number of claims sent to adjudication have dipped, too, from 1,500 a week at the height of the problem to 100 or so now, he estimated.
But both the adjudication and appeals processes have to be handled by staffers who have a higher level of expertise. Harrington acknowledged that that has “become a lot harder” during the pandemic.
‘It makes you want to scream’
Karen Smegal-Butler, of Morrisville, lost her job as a recruiter in the hospitality sector last summer. Since October, she has been trying to obtain benefits she is owed for the month of July 2020, she said.
Months and multiple calls later, the department is unable to say where her claim stands in the adjudication process.
“Everybody there has wanted to help, but I feel as though their hands have been tied and they either don’t have access to different parts of the system or they’re not empowered to truly share information on my case,” Smegal-Butler said.
Caleb Teske of Lyndon left his job tending a bar in Smugglers Notch last March as the pandemic hit because he has an immune disorder, he said. He was eligible to receive benefits under the labor department’s expanded eligibility for people who left the workforce for a set of new, pandemic-related reasons.
Teske filed for benefits last March. It took three months of calling the department to begin receiving benefits, and he has relied on them since last summer.
Recently, though, communication faltered again, Teske said. On Monday, he spent more than an hour on hold when he called the department to file a new benefit claim for the week. (The labor department recently shuttered its online filing portal, in an effort to curb digital fraud that flooded its system in recent weeks.)
When his call was finally transferred to another employee, the second staffer did not pick up, he said, and the line cut out.
He opened a new claim to qualify for a new benefit year at the start of April, and is still waiting for benefits for that month to arrive in his bank account, Teske said.
“It’s frustrating,” Teske said. “I try to not let it get to me, but sometimes it really just makes you want to scream.”
Harrington encouraged claimants to think about when to call the department to make a claim. Monday mornings tend to involve long wait times as people rush to make new weekly claims, he said, but the department has shortened wait times on calls at other points of the week.
Giles, the Colchester resident, has tried to stay patient as she waits for word on the status of her April PUA payments. But she’s growing more anxious as the weeks wear on.
“I have bills to pay, and I can’t believe it’s taken this long to fix,” Giles said.
Calls for reform
On Tuesday evening, lawmakers from two committees in the Vermont House of Representatives — the Committee on Commerce and Economic Development, and the Committee on Government Operations — gathered virtually for a hearing on the ways the state’s unemployment insurance system has affected Vermonters over the past year.
Employers and laid-off workers told of their experiences with the state’s UI system. One of them was Llu Mulvaney-Stanak, a Burlington resident who shared their experience filing for unemployment for the first time in the pandemic.
“This was humbling to say the least, and we were so grateful for the expanded eligibility,” Mulvaney-Stanak said. “While the DOL has stated the internal systems are woefully out of date, I think there are bigger issues. It’s in communication with users, user interface, and oversight management of the program.”
Mulvaney-Stanak described excessive wait times, and problems with out-of-state call center employees who were unable to answer questions. The labor department website, too, “is a total mess, with outdated information, broken links, and an interface that is really hard to navigate,” they said.
When Mulvaney-Stanak saw that former Governor Howard Dean had received a sheaf of wrongly-mailed unemployment booklets amid the surge of fraud that has gripped the department, “I had to laugh, because I never got anything when I signed up,” they said.
Llu’s sister, Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, P/D-Burlington, is a member of the commerce committee. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said the testimony emphasized a need for the labor department to think critically about its staffing levels as the agency emerges from the pandemic.
The delays on decisions and the long wait times a year into the pandemic are “unconscionable,” Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said.
“We’re under-resourcing that department,” she said. “I think there’s this neoliberal attachment to doing more with less in terms of state employees, and we get poor quality as a result of that. It is long overdue for the state of Vermont to put its own money into the Department of Labor, especially around unemployment, instead of only relying on what the federal government gives us.”
Vermont has plenty of company in facing calls for unemployment insurance reform. Nationally, experts say the crisis has exposed deep problems in states’ unemployment systems.
“This is another part of the infrastructure in our country that needs to be updated, and we need to put resources into our systems so this doesn’t happen again,” said Elise Gould, an expert on wages and poverty at the Economic Policy Institute. “This is the kind of trouble that many people were facing in the past. But it happened so quickly when millions were claiming that it became clear to more people how broken the system was.”
Harrington would like some changes, too. He pointed to low levels of federal funding as a key reason the department has struggled at points of the pandemic.
“Many states, including Vermont, have had to constantly reduce the size of their program and their staffing levels to meet the budgetary constraints put on them by the federal government,” the commissioner said.
But even with a portion of Gov. Phil Scott’s proposed budget allocated for IT upgrades this year, Harrington said modernization of the department’s system would take years. And he agreed that staffing increases — particularly the number of rigorously trained staff members — must accompany those modernization efforts.
“If you had asked me before the pandemic to design and build an unemployment insurance system, it would be much different than the system I would design and build today following the pandemic,” Harrington said.
As Vermont employers continue a long-term struggle to hire enough people, business leaders have pushed back on efforts in the Legislature to expand unemployment benefits. They argue that greater benefits could disincentivize people from re-entering the workforce.
Last week, the Labor Department announced it will reinstate a requirement that laid-off workers must actively seek employment if they want to qualify for benefits. The change is intended to encourage workers to re-enter the labor market as vaccinations against the virus continue, according to the department.
“We’re hearing from employers that their biggest gripe is that the workforce requirement should be reinstated, and we want people to be incentivized to go back to work,” Cameron Wood, director of the labor department’s unemployment insurance division, told officials in the House Commerce Committee in April.
Teske, the Lyndon resident, said people should understand that collecting benefits makes more sense for some Vermonters who were earning scant hourly wages before the pandemic.
“People are tired of working dead-end jobs for low wages, and most people will work hard if you pay them good money,” he said.
In his case, Teske said, he made more money tending bar than on unemployment. With his immune disorder, he remains fearful of catching Covid-19, but said he would still go back to work if given the opportunity — he just hasn’t been able to find a restaurant job because of lowered staffing levels at his old place of employment.
Meanwhile, Teske said, the labor department’s push to get workers back into the job market has been a bitter pill to swallow.
Labor department employees are “getting paid to work safely from home, and I can’t reach anyone there,” Teske said. “At the same time, they want me to get back to work. It’s hypocritical and condescending and quite frankly feels a little unsafe.”
