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Unemployment Insurance In The District? Skyrocketing Claims Strain An Ancient System
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t-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman (I) spends her afternoons on the Seventh Floor of One Judiciary Square. There she sits with 100 other District employees, some employed by DC Department of Employment Services (DOES), many pulled from a range of other District agencies, to answer the deluge of calls related to Unemployment Insurance (UI) claims. Silverman, who is Chair of the DC Council Labor Committee, works in the auxiliary call center set up in the office of the attorney general, making her way through the hundreds of pleas her office receives from constituents made desperate by a bottleneck in the UI application process. “We are seeing just depression level numbers of workers filing for unemployment,” she said. “The system wasn’t built for this kind of capacity.” A look at the District’s UI system reveals a system
by Elizabeth O’Gorek
struggling to keep up with an unprecedented number of requests from applicants. Many have waited weeks for relief to come.
The Unemployment Tsunami With 65,000 jobs lost in DC since March 13, many District residents find themselves applying for assistance for the first time, a situation Silverman said can be scary, confusing and time-consuming. It is an application “tsunami.” Between March 13 and May 21, DOES received 100,499 unemployment claims, almost four times as many received in 2019, when DC saw about 27,000 claims. Restaurant dining rooms were closed March 24. Unemployment rose to 11.1 percent from 6 percent in March. More than 40 percent of applicants for District UI are waiting for money. Of the more than 100,000 claims received by DOES as of May 21, only 59,914 people re-
Chart showing the number of UI claims made each week in the District, from March 13 to May 21, versus the number of payments made per week. Source: DOES/EOM Situational Report May 22
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ceived a check, leaving more than 40,000 people waiting for funds. About 18,000 of those are in the appeals process, said DOES Director Unique Morris-Hughes at a May 22nd press conference. Another 17,000 were received in the 21 days previous, within the time DOES tries to process claims.
Dehumanizing One in seven District workers are employed in the hospitality industry, which has been decimated by the outbreak, especially by the March 24 closure of restaurant dining rooms. Trupti Patel is a bartender who worked her last shift on March 12. She is also the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for 2A03 and an activist with the Restaurant Opportunity Centers (ROC), an organization that works to improve working conditions and wages for restaurant employees and is now acting as an unofficial unemployment consultant to restaurant workers. Patel filed for UI online a few days after she was laid off and got a notice from the system to call DOES. She spent six and a half hours on hold to resolve a small clerical error. She received a check in mid-April, four weeks after she applied. She was lucky, she says, because she had savings. “Director Morris-Hughes keeps saying we need to be patient with this, but people are starving,” Patel said. “There are people that are still waiting for their benefits, people who still haven’t gotten paid in eight weeks.” Patel said the pay of most hospitality workers had already been decimated in the weeks before closure. In her last three shifts, she said, she earned what she usually brought home after only one. Most restaurant workers, having just paid rent and bills prior to the serious decrease in pay, were broke at that point. She said the system has ‘traumatized and dehumanized’ applicants, many of whom were on hold for hours with DOES before the system abruptly hung up. Others waited hours only to be told to call back when they had correct documentation. Some found out they had been listed as contractors by their employers when they tried to file, making them ineligible for regular benefits. The unemployment application tsunami overwhelming DOES is further complicated by a recent federallydriven expansion of unemployment benefits.
