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Ohioans desperate to reach unemployment hotline as calls dropped, claims languish by Cid Standifer
M
arcia Gassaway was in the first wave of Ohioans put out of work by COVID-19.
The single mom from Cleveland went to the emergency room on March 15. Due to her coronavirus-like symptoms, doctors ordered that she be quarantined at a special facility.
could stay home instead of spreading the virus. Gassaway has been without any income for five weeks, and she doesn’t know why her claim hasn’t been paid. She got through to an operator once, who told her to upload a note from her doctor. She did. That was weeks ago, and she said her claim is still listed as “pending.”
Now, she’s recovering at home with her children, calling the unemployment helpline over and over again.
ODJFS knows the system is having problems due to the explosion in applicants since Gov. Mike DeWine ordered all bars and restaurants to close.
“I call every day, every day,” she said. “I’m trying to recover with my health. It’s so scary...I cry at night because I don’t know what to do.”
Between March 15 and April 11, the number of unemployment insurance claims exceeded all claims filed in the previous two years.
Each time she dials the number, she hears an automated message that the system is experiencing a high call volume. Then it hangs up.
On April 14, at his daily press conference, DeWine fielded a question about people who have been waiting weeks for their first unemployment payment.
Until she got sick, Gassaway worked at the Amazon fulfillment center in Euclid. She hasn’t been laid off, but she doesn’t have paid sick leave, and her doctors haven’t given her clearance yet to return to work, where she might risk infecting coworkers. When DeWine shut down all Ohio bars and restaurants in mid-March, he expanded unemployment eligibility to cover people just like Gassaway so they
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“It’s very upsetting to me,” he said, “and we can go through all the reasons why that is happening. But the bottom line for those of you who are not getting your check or have not been getting into the system, I don’t think you want to hear anything. I think you want us to fix it.”
ODJFS has been scrambling to expand its capacity to handle claims, and to set up new systems for each new kind of benefit added on the federal and state level. That includes the extra $600 per week benefit under the CARES Act, extended benefits for people receiving unemployment, and new eligibility for self-employed workers or those who didn’t make enough to typically qualify. So far, though, the traffic is all funnelled through the existing Ohio Job Insurance system, which was built in 2004. The state already had plans to update OJI, and hired a company called Sagitec Solutions in January 2019 to build a new system. But the process was expected to take two years. It wasn’t anywhere near ready to take over when the pandemic’s unemployment wave hit the department’s 16-year-old system. According to ODJFS numbers released April 16, 855,197 people applied for unemployment between March 15 and April 11. Over the same time period, the department paid claims out to 271,000 people — about 32%. Other states have been hamstrung because their systems are written in COBOL, an antiquated programming language that went out of vogue in the 1980s. ODJFS spokesman Bret Crow said
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the OJI system is based on a combination Z of COBOL and Java, a much more a commonly used language. h T “We are not in the position of other w states that need to beat the bushes to a find folks who know COBOL,” Crow said t in an email. “While we have experienced m slow processing times because our system is overloaded with claims just like C every other state’s online claims system, fi programmers have not been an issue for u Ohio.” s b The department has been on a hiring u spree for people to answer the phones. Before the lockdown, there were 42 “ unemployment phone operators, Lt. Gov.s John Husted said at a press conference on April 15. Now they have about 1,194, A all working remotely. Another 337 S can join the team once they complete o training. w s Husted said next week they will also S add voice recognition systems to answer c frequently asked questions, and a s “virtual call center” system is being set up. Crow said the virtual call center “ would be cloud-based, making it easier w to add more staff. “
As of April 12, Crow said the average T time callers were spending on hold was h about 26 minutes. b s
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