Heavy filings for jobless benefits crash system

In “Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution,” Tracy Chapman sang about “wasting time on the unemployment lines.”

Twenty years later, high-tech—while a contributing factor to unemployment—has made standing in line a thing of the past. States have cut intake workers and closed neighborhood unemployment offices. Now a newly laid-off worker must call a processing center or file online.

In the first week of January, as the number of workers filing new claims reached a 26-year high and the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 7.2 percent, the job center computer systems in New York, North Carolina and Ohio crashed.

All 50 states reported being overwhelmed by the volume of calls: 10,000 per hour in New York, 2 million per day in California, doubling of the number of claims in Kentucky, tripling in North Carolina, and so on. “Be prepared to wait and just hang on. Try not to get frustrated,” urged Howard Cosgrove, spokesperson for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. (Associated Press, Jan. 6)

This reporter, a laid-off Chrysler worker, spent over four hours calling the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, which has absorbed the once-separate Ohio Bureau of Employment Services. Each time, after I listened to a series of recorded messages, a voice told me that I could file online and that “this call will end now.”

But when I went online, the Web site was down. Finally a human being explained that the computers were down, and ODJFS workers were filling out applications by hand. Three days later there was still no computer record of my application.

The state had known for two weeks that the near-shutdown of Chrysler alone would lead to thousands of new claims—including mine—in the first week of the year. Why weren’t enough workers hired to handle the flood of calls? Why weren’t there enough computer technicians to get the system up and running in a timely manner?

The number of unemployed workers is officially 11 million and rising. This is an undercount. How are these workers supposed to find time to look for a job if they’re spending all day trying to file for a measly—in Ohio the maximum is around $400 a week—unemployment check?

With joblessness on a par with the recession of the early 1980s, it’s a cruel irony of capitalism that even the agencies that service the unemployed are understaffed.

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to be “talkin’ ’bout a revolution.”