Six months into the pandemic, hundreds of out-of-work Mainers still haven’t received their full unemployment benefits.
“They tell you what you want to hear to get you off the phone. ‘It’ll take two weeks.’ It doesn’t take two weeks. ‘We’ll call you back.’ They don’t call you back,” said Dresden resident Cassandra LaPointe, 26, who says she has made countless phone calls to the Maine Department of Labor trying to get 14 weeks of back-paid benefits.
“I think that they’re trying to make people give up,” she said. “For a time, I did give up. I didn’t call for three weeks. I was like, ‘Screw it.’”
There are currently 45,400 open unemployment claims in Maine.
The Department of Labor has struggled to stay ahead of the massive spike in claims that began in March. Earlier this summer, there were reports of thousands of people who had not received their full benefits months after applying. That number is now likely down to hundreds, according to organizers with the Maine AFL-CIO and Maine Equal Justice (MEJ) who have been assisting workers with delayed claims since the onset of the pandemic.
Maine is not the only state to fall behind with backlogs of unresolved claims. Benefits systems across the country left millions of people without financial aid during the unemployment crisis.
“After years of disinvestment and underfunding, benefits systems across the country have been left starved and in disrepair,” VOX reported in May, when 33 million Americans were unemployed. “It is broken, and in many cases, it is broken by design.”
Maine’s system is out of tune with today’s labor force
Some advocates in Maine believe the reason that people have fallen through the cracks here, as in other states, is because the benefits system has been neglected by policy makers for decades and not modernized to reflect how workers, particularly low-wage workers, are actually employed in the modern economy.
“There haven’t been the kinds of substantive changes needed in state systems to stay in tune with the changing labor force,” said Christine Hastedt, MEJ’s senior policy advisor. “So, what you saw happening was Congress basically having to address those inadequacies in very short order by creating three new programs out of whole cloth.”
Congress created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which extended benefits to nearly 40 percent more unemployed workers who typically do not qualify — freelancers, independent contractors, gig workers, self-employed workers and others with low wages or irregular work schedules who have long been shut out of the system. They also created Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) to address inadequate state benefits, as well as Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which gave an extra 13 weeks of aid to those who exhaust their benefits when jobs are scarce.
These federal programs, each with different eligibility requirements and start dates, all had to be implemented on the state level by a Department of Labor that only had 14 staff positions dedicated to processing claims at the start of the pandemic.
“They didn’t have the staff to handle the volume of claims. That’s a function of administrative funding having been starved for years,” Hastedt said. “They had to hire those folks and train them on complicated programs. That all took time.”
LaPointe was one of those workers whose needs were not adequately met by the existing system. She had not worked enough hours in the last year to be eligible for regular unemployment, working a series of restaurant and retail jobs the last two years and taking some time off in the summer of 2019 while she was pregnant. She was again between jobs at the time that the pandemic hit.
In addition to being out of work for months, LePointe had to wait to apply until July, when applications through PEUC opened.
“You get a vibe from some of the staffers on the phone that they don’t think we should be on it,” LaPointe said. “They don’t think we deserve it, just because I wasn’t working the exact day when COVID struck.”
Mt. Vernon resident Connie Leach, 65, was out of work last year and exhausted her benefits before the pandemic struck. PEUC expanded the benefit timeframe, but still Leach said she has had to call the DOL many times over the last six months fighting for six weeks of back-paid benefits.
“They keep telling me, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s coming.’ It’s not coming. They don’t care about fixing it. They just act like I’m a pain in the butt,” she said, explaining that she has tried unsuccessfully to get a meeting with DOL Commissioner Laura Fortman and Governor Janet Mills.
Leach has also cobbled together a livelihood working a variety of retail and healthcare jobs in rural Kennebec County, where she says good jobs are hard to come by. She is also immunocomprimised and can’t take a public-facing job. Leach was hoping to retire at 67, but the last six months upended those plans.
“Just before COVID happened, I had a really good job lined up but that disappeared. I was hoping at least to pay off my debt in the next two years so I could retire,” she said. “But I owe money to my family now. My credit is horrible. Some of my bills have gone to collections.”
‘It’s a systems problem in need of a systems resolution’
LaPointe and Leach are the sort of modern underemployed workers that the state’s benefit system has failed to protect for many years.
“We all know that the workforce is very different than it was in the 1930s when the unemployment program was created. There’s a whole lot more women in the workforce today. Those women are often family caretakers, yet the system really doesn’t recognize that if you all of a sudden have a child care emergency and you have to leave your job, you still need benefits, but can’t get them. Contract and freelance workers make up an ever-increasing share of the workforce. There’s a ton of part-time workers who show up for work in the morning, finding that maybe there won’t be work for them that day,” Hastedt said. “These kinds of jobs are an increasing part of the landscape now and these workers need benefits just as certainly as if they got laid off from a manufacturing job in 1950.”
While stories of long delays made the news in Maine this summer, investigations into the source of the dysfunction have seemingly created more questions than answers.
Some state lawmakers have pointed to DOL’s online application system implemented by ReEmployUSA, a consortium between Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Mississippi to share the cost of running their unemployment systems. Maine’s online portal has drawn complaints for not being user-friendly and rejecting claims based on technicalities.
Across the country, disqualifications for procedural reasons have nearly doubled over the past five years as states moved to online claim-filing, according to a study by the National Employment Law Project.
But Hastedt thinks laying the blame solely on the online system will invite only narrow technocratic policy solutions. She believes the fix requires far more sweeping changes.
“It is a real disservice to the size and scope of the problem — and to the unemployed workers who need help. It’s a systems problem in need of a systems solution,” she said. “If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we have to rebuild this program and reshape it to meet the needs of today’s workforce.”
The real culprit, Hastedt contends, is not the workers manning the phone lines at the Department of Labor, or even the administrators, but decades of political neglect that has resulted in a program that is unresponsive to today’s workforce, especially low-wage workers.
“There’s been tremendous politics at play for some time now aimed at shrinking programs that help struggling families. We’ve seems them in programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and SNAP (formerly food stamps). There’s been a deliberate effort to discredit the real needs that families face by basically playing on the ‘worthy’ versus ‘unworthy’ view of poverty,” she said.
“In the early years of former Governor Paul LePage, we saw the same approach with unemployment benefits with legislative efforts that forced a focus on fraud. In fact, there is very little real fraud in the unemployment system. That will only undermine efforts to recognize the real changes that must be made in the unemployment system. We need to build an unemployment system that broadens the duration, benefits and the kind of workers it covers, not only for the sake of the workers who need it, but for our economy as a whole.”
Photo: Protesters take part in the AFL-CIO Workers First Caravan for Racial and Economic Justice near the U.S. Capitol on June 17 in Washington DC. The caravan circled the U.S. Capitol and national mall while honking their car horns to bring attention to their cause.| Drew Angerer, Getty Images
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