A few weeks ago, on a Sunday afternoon, my boss called me to say that the restaurant I worked at in New York City was closing indefinitely. Like the more than sixteen million others who were laid off due to the COVID-19 outbreak in the past few weeks, I was now unemployed.
In the three weeks after I lost my job, more than sixteen million people across the country did, too.
That phone call came a few days after Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered most restaurants to operate at half capacity, and just hours before Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all restaurants had to pivot to take-out and delivery only.
Two days later, The New York Times ran an article under the headline, “Rush for Jobless Benefits Crashes New York State Website.”
This wasn’t an exaggeration. I began filing my claim for unemployment on Wednesday, March 18, the day of the week assigned to me based on the first letter of my last name to reduce congestion. Trying to navigate an overloaded website ate up an entire day.
On Thursday, after countless failed attempts, I decided to try my hand at filing over the phone. At first, this strategy seemed to work: When I finished with the same automated questions I had answered dozens of times online, a message told me that my answers had been saved. To complete my application, the message stated, I had to be transferred to a representative. Finally, I thought.
Then I got disconnected from the call. I dialed back several times, but a pre-recorded message kept telling me that I should try again later because of “extremely high call volume.” By then, the button to “File a New Claim” on my online account had stopped appearing.
When I called at eight o’clock the next morning, I couldn’t even connect. “Welcome to Verizon Wireless. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again,” I heard on my next seven attempts. Hours later, I got the call back later message again.
Out of options, I messaged the New York State Department of Labor’s Twitter account. It asked me to send my full name and phone number and assured me that “our team will call you directly as soon as we can.”
Four days later, as I strolled on a path along the Hudson River’s east bank, a cheery older man with ample patience named Bob called from an Albany area code and completed my application in less time than it took me to walk past a few baseball fields. Bob’s let’s just get the job done spirit lifted a weight off my shoulders. My first payment arrived a week later.
In the three weeks after I lost my job, more than sixteen million people across the country did, too.
The Federal Reserve predicts that forty-seven million Americans might be laid off by the end of the coronavirus pandemic, leaving almost a third of workers unemployed—far surpassing the Great Depression’s and the Great Recession’s peaks of 25 percent in 1933 and 10 percent in 2009, respectively.
In New York, the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States, the story is no different. According to the New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL), more than 80,000 people filed for unemployment during the first week after businesses started to close. When Governor Andrew Cuomo put New York “on PAUSE,” requiring all “nonessential” work to cease, that number jumped to nearly 370,000 in the second week and another 350,000 by the third week.
Because these figures only refer to new claims, they likely don’t represent the total number of those out of work. NYSDOL has been so overwhelmed that many recently unemployed New Yorkers haven’t even been able to complete an unemployment application. In a typical week, NYSDOL receives about 50,000 calls and 350,000 visits to its website. During the second week of quarantine, it registered some 8.2 million calls and 3.4 million site visits.
Lucie, who asked that we not use her last name, recently lost her job as a hospitality worker. Last week, she submitted her application for unemployment insurance online, but received a message saying she had to call NYSDOL to complete the process. “That’s when the nightmare started,” she told The Progressive.
“At this point, I can’t just sit here and make phone calls. So I’m probably going to give up and go back to work during a pandemic, which I shouldn’t have to do.”
Lucie got the same automated message I did: We are experiencing extremely high call volume. Please call back later. “Literally three-thousand-plus calls later, I’m still trying to get through,” she said after four days of frustration.
Citing the psychological toll of applying, Lucie shared with The Progressive a text message from the twelve-year-old son of one of her friends: “Please do my mom a favor and file for her so she doesn’t have a mental breakdown in front of her children.”
Another applicant, Maddy Willis, is a bartender in Brooklyn who has been trying to file for more than three weeks. She said she has been calling NYSDOL 200 times per day.
Willis is now considering whether or not to work take-out at the restaurant that laid her off. “I’m probably going to have to take it. I don’t really want to do it, but I’m not getting through,” she said. “At this point, I can’t just sit here and make phone calls. So I’m probably going to give up and go back to work during a pandemic, which I shouldn’t have to do.”
For Gina Boccia, NYSDOL’s website crashed so many times that she got locked out of her account. So she decided to call and, unlike Lucie and Willis, finally got through to a representative and filed her application after waiting on hold for an hour. But when Boccia asked for help with her online account, the representative gave her a different phone number to call.
That phone number, as Boccia found out, belongs to the Florida office of Cottage Gardens, a plant and tree nursery. “Oh my god, I’ve gotten about 150 calls in the last few weeks” from people trying to claim unemployment benefits, a staff member at Cottage Gardens told The Progressive.
Despite the difficulty of registering, those who haven’t been able to file a claim yet won’t lose any benefits, which retroactively cover claimants from the day after they were laid off thanks to an executive order signed early on by Governor Cuomo to suspend New York’s one-week waiting period—a policy that later made its way into the federal stimulus package. However, given how difficult it is to file, those benefits might arrive later than many people need them.
To speed up the claims process, NYSDOL has extended telephone filing hours through Saturdays and Sundays, added servers to support the website’s capacity, and brought in hundreds of new staff members to process the unprecedented spike in claims. The agency also claims that it has streamlined the application procedure by “automating additional pieces of the process so there are fewer reasons a filer has to call the hotline,” though it is unclear which pieces those are.
When asked for more detail, NYSDOL Deputy Director of Communications Deanna Cohen wrote in an email last week: “There are several instances where someone may have to call to verify certain information to complete their claim. We have reduced those instances where someone would have to speak to a representative by over half.”
On April 9, NYSDOL announced that applicants who were asked to call to complete their application no longer were required to do so. Instead, a representative “will call you back within seventy-two hours,” according to the agency’s statement. It also announced a “Tech Surge” in partnership with Google, Verizon, and Deloitte to enhance the efficiency of its website and call center.
But with rent and countless other bills due, these small fixes simply aren’t enough. As neoliberalism has reigned supreme over the past forty years, the public sector—so vital to maintaining stability and security during times of crisis like this one—has been hollowed out, leaving millions of workers precarious.
While the federal coronavirus relief plan expanded the amount, duration, and scope of unemployment insurance, there are still many who may not be eligible, including undocumented immigrants, others whose work and pay isn’t documented, anyone who left their job before the outbreak of COVID-19 and wasn’t collecting unemployment, those who have been fired, and some who have trouble speaking English.
For these workers left behind by the United States’ meager brand of social democracy, the future is gravely uncertain.