Before COVID-19, Nikki Rentz was a full-time pet sitter and dog walker in East Atlanta.
“All that went away, every single bit of it,” Rentz said. “There were a few people that worked at the CDC that I could still walk their dogs, but even those eventually phased out to working from home.”
She’s an independent contractor and therefore not eligible for state unemployment benefits, but she filed for unemployment anyway after Congress passed the relief bill for states. It included $600 a week for gig workers, freelancers and other people like her, who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus.
“I quickly realized that Georgia wasn’t set up for it, because it was a new program,” Rentz said.
It took state and federal officials several weeks to set up a new system that could handle the payouts authorized by Congress. Rentz finally got an email from the Georgia Department of Labor saying she may be eligible for the federal help, also known as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance or PUA, but she needed to upload some more information. This is when Rentz discovered a private Facebook page for fellow Georgians applying for unemployment benefits called “Georgia Unemployment issues COVID-19.”
“So I joined that page, and it helped me a lot even in just knowing that other people are in the same situation,” she said.
The page has nearly 3,000 members and is full of posts of people voicing their frustration, giving tips, expressing their need for money to pay rent. Most of them have experienced some kind of delay in getting payments.
Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler knows this is a problem. He said his office is trying to manage the onslaught of claims with limited staff, adding that most delays are due to errors in the information people submit.
“As we go through the process, we’re looking at ways that we can take some of thee issues we’re seeing, some of the places where we’re seeing the most errors and find a workaround instead of going in and fixing every single error,” he said.
So, it’s a process, and Butler said he needs to make sure there is no fraud. More than 41,000 gig workers have been processed so far and are getting their money, according to DOL officials. But the claim numbers show that there could be a couple of hundred thousand more Georgians eligible for PUA payment who are still in the queue.
For those who are now depending on the PUA money, the wait is nerve-wracking. Rentz said she waited for weeks.
“Constantly checking my email, constantly checking my mailbox, thinking I did something wrong on my application,” she said. “It was really stressful.”
She finally did get paid and is one of the first 41,000, probably because she tried to apply for state benefits early, knowing she would not qualify. It turns out that you have to be rejected for state benefits before you can apply for PUA payments.
Rentz said when her payments finally came through, she was grateful, but she knows there are thousands of Georgians like her still waiting to get their money.
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Georgia Gig Workers Find Long, 'Stressful' Wait For Unemployment Payments | 90.1 FM WABE - WABE 90.1 FM
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