A tenth of the workforce has filed for unemployment. How NC is trying to fix delays.
North Carolina’s job losses passed a symbolic point Thursday, with more than half a million people now filing for unemployment in the three weeks since businesses starting closing down due to coronavirus.
The jobless claims are equivalent to 10% of the state’s entire workforce.
As of February North Carolina had 5.1 million people in the labor force, which counts people who are working or looking for work. And the 510,000 new jobless claims since mid-March don’t even reflect all the state’s job losses — just the number of people who have filed for unemployment.
Numerous readers have told The News & Observer that they have spent days trying unsuccessfully to file for the benefits, thwarted by website glitches, hours-long phone wait times or, in some cases, a phone system that’s so backlogged their calls simply get hung up on instead of being put on hold.
“We’re trying to get that system better, and that has certainly been very frustrating on our behalf,” Lockhart Taylor, the head of the state’s unemployment office, told state lawmakers earlier this week at a coronavirus committee hearing.
He said they’ve already made some improvements to the website and have hired more call center staff, and are working on doing even more.
On Thursday, Gov. Roy Cooper issued a wide-ranging executive order that, among other goals, had a section aimed at speeding up the unemployment system. Cooper’s new order allows the unemployment office to ignore several regulations it normally has to follow if officials decide it would “significantly speed the processing” of claims and “expedite the distribution” of benefit payments.
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Slow on payments
Before coronavirus hit, the state’s unemployment system ranked last nationally in making timely payments, the Carolina Journal reported this week.
Data from the U.S. Department of Labor showed that on average, states paid benefits on time in nearly 9 out of 10 cases. But in North Carolina, a third of claims weren’t paid on time. Those figures are for the first quarter of the year, a time period that includes the first two weeks of the surge in coronavirus-related unemployment. One state, Alabama, did not submit information.
“North Carolina’s unemployment division is the worst in the nation at getting timely payments to its applicants, and has been for several years,” reported the Carolina Journal, a conservative-leaning news publication.
North Carolina has also had among the nation’s lowest-paying unemployment benefits for years, after the state legislature approved large-scale cuts in 2013, The News & Observer has reported.
Those reduced payments have led to $4 billion in savings for the unemployment fund. Some state lawmakers in both parties have talked about wanting to dip into that surplus now to help people out, although details are few and far between.
The legislature isn’t planning to come back to work on potential relief plans for close to three more weeks, on April 28.
Federal unemployment benefits
Congress approved extra unemployment benefits for people in a recent federal stimulus package.
For people who have already qualified for state benefits, officials here hope to be able to start sending the federal payments — which are more than double what North Carolina pays the average unemployed person — on April 17.
And for people who don’t qualify for state benefits, there could still be a chance of getting federal benefits. That includes many self-employed people like independent contractors, freelancers and those in the gig economy.
The federal government told states the rules for those benefits only a few days ago, however. North Carolina officials are now saying they expect to be able to start taking those applications two weeks from now, on April 25.
““They don’t understand that everything’s accelerated,” Mark Barroso, a freelance TV crew member from Pittsboro told the N&O recently, questioning why the federal benefits were taking so many weeks. “They need to speed up everything.”
Even without the extra applications yet from people like Barroso who expect to apply only for the federal benefits, Taylor has said the massive volume of unemployment claims is already like nothing North Carolina has ever seen before.
Record-breaking job losses
The office got around 11,000 new claims in all of February combined, but in the last three weeks has been getting an average of 21,000 each day. It even dwarfs the job losses North Carolina saw during the Great Recession.
That’s the case in most of the rest of the country, too, as millions of people are suddenly out of work and seeking benefits — although some recent reports have said that North Carolina has been among the states hardest-hit by job losses.
State officials have previously said that at the height of the Great Recession a decade ago, the unemployment office was seeing 100,000 new claims a month. But just between March 16 and April 9, North Carolina saw 509,693 new unemployment claims.
The state allows people to indicate whether their job loss was caused in some way by COVID-19.
Close to 90% of the people filing for unemployment benefits said that the pandemic was the reason they lost their job, and state officials have previously said they think there are probably even more people who should have checked that box but didn’t.
This story was originally published April 10, 2020 at 4:49 PM.
