Unemployment System Continues to Frustrate as Economy Struggles
An Illinois Department of Employment Security office on Lawrence Ave. in Chicago. (Photo Credit: WTTW-TV)
There are experiences in which people rarely have a painless encounter. Nearly nobody enjoys getting a cavity filled at the dentist, standing in line at the driver’s services facility, or filing for unemployment benefits.
What was often a frustrating and cumbersome process under the best of circumstances became an especially painful one for tens of thousands of Illinoisans who suddenly found themselves out of work all at once when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“I was jumping through a whole lot of hoops in order to get unemployment going,” said Ryan Burnett, a music teacher in Chicago who was laid off from his job at a Catholic school in June 2020. “The first major obstacle was on their page, it defaulted back my birth year to the current year so the first problem was convincing them I was not indeed a six-month old person looking for unemployment.”
The latest Illinois unemployment numbers show there are more people in Burnett’s situation than before. The Illinois Department of Employment and Security (IDES) reported the state’s unemployment rate ticked up to 7.6 percent in December 2020, about double what it was in December 2019. An estimated 423,300 jobs have vanished since the pandemic hit.
Stories similar to Burnett’s can be found all around the state. A suburban man took the state to court to get unemployment benefits. Thousands more have had fraudulent claims filed with their identities, including an Illinois congressman.
“We had this resurgence of COVID (in December) and some closures that weren’t really expected so that really had a short-term impact,” said Dr. Fred Giertz, professor emeritus in the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “On the other hand, I think the longer-term expectation is very positive because now the vaccine, even though I don’t think it’s had any effect so far, is going to take hold soon and have some important impacts in reopening the economy.”
There might be light at the end of the tunnel with some vaccinations underway, but there are still thousands of jobs that have been destroyed in the meantime.
“We can see in (the latest) data that COVID-19 continues to place an extraordinary burden on businesses, workers and communities in Illinois,” said Erin Guthrie, Director of the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) in a statement.
Guthrie’s statement mentioned more than $1 billion in relief sent out since March. Multiple attempts to speak to someone from IDES about the state’s efforts went unanswered.
In May, Governor JB Pritzker demoted the interim director of IDES, installing Kristin Richards as director. Richards is a longtime aide to former Senate President John Cullerton.
Illinois had a lower unemployment rate than the national average before the pandemic but now it’s nearly a full percentage point higher, 7.6 percent compared to 6.7 percent across the country. Giertz said it’s common for people to blame high taxes or politics for that but he said it’s more a byproduct of not having the warmer climate of many growing states in the Sun Belt.
It has appeared, through many accounts, the state wasn’t prepared for the gigantic increase in claims and didn’t respond quickly enough once they began.
Chicago’s WBBM-TV reported in May employees felt the agency was understaffed and they were being instructed not to adequately help each individual.
“All they wanted us to do was literally push them through,” an unidentified state employee said at the time. “Not try and fix them, not try to get everything – just push them through that way and deal with them later. Push them through. How is that helping anyone?”
The unemployment numbers are all people, most of whom desperately need unemployment benefits to keep paying the bills.
“It’s frustrating,” Burnett said. “It was also complicated by the fact (IDES is) probably dealing with a substantial amount of traffic more than they’re used to.”
Giertz said the state’s unemployment system was designed to handle small changes in the job market, a couple percentage points up or down each month. The unprecedented job losses as Illinois and states around the country suddenly went into lockdowns wasn’t part of the plan.
“I don’t think anyone would suggest we should have an IDES which is ten times as big because every ten to 20 years there’s this kind of crisis,” Giertz said. “Similarly, I’m not sure we want to build five times as many emergency rooms and intensive care beds as we have now because maybe five or ten or 20 years from now, we may have another crisis like this so if the demand far exceeds what the normal expectation is there’s going to be problems.”
Giertz said that doesn’t excuse the delays thousands of Illinoisans have seen getting their unemployment benefits, but, he believes, it’s a reasonable explanation.
It took months, but Burnett was able to finally get his benefits and back pay.
“It just seems like the pace of governmental action is always remarkably and notably slower than you’d like, Burnett said.
But just when he thought he was done, he got sucked right back in. His unemployment benefits were flagged for potential fraud, which has been rampant across the country and the state. Burnett said someone from IDES helped clear up the situation but not without an extra bout of anxiety before it was settled.
“It’s so very obvious that there isn’t a lot of motivation or kind of ‘get up and go’ on their part to make it happen,” he said. “It’s the fact that it ends in .gov and not .com that it seems to be running that slow. Amazon would not do this.”
Giertz said there are many people who have saved up money during the pandemic while not going out as much as they used to. No coincidence, the leisure and hospitality industry had by far the biggest job losses in 2020 according to IDES. Giertz said whenever people start heading back out, the economy could rebound quickly. Whenever that happens can’t come quickly enough for the nearly half a million Illinoisans who had a job a year ago but no longer do.
