Jobless benefits are a lifeline – if the unemployed can get access

In economic hard times, unemployment assistance brings rapid, and needed, relief. This time, states are scrambling, and learning lessons in readiness amid a historically fast spike in unemployment.

Every morning, Ciara Bailey wakes up at 7:45 a.m., calls the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry when it opens at 8:00 a.m., and waits on hold – only to get disconnected.

Ms. Bailey filed for unemployment in March after both of the Pittsburgh restaurants where she worked closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. She says many of her co-workers have started to receive unemployment benefits, but a check has yet to arrive in her mailbox.

“It’s scary, it’s really scary, especially now that money is dwindling. Having my daughter, do I go [work] somewhere that’s essential, like a grocery store and work and come home?” says Ms. Bailey, whose 8-year-old daughter has only one lung and has gone to a hospital for flu-like symptoms in the past. “I would be coming home … and putting everybody else at risk too.”

Like so many Americans, the single mother now needs unemployment benefits to survive an economic downturn that is pushing unemployment to rates not seen since the Great Depression. With more than 26.5 million Americans having filed jobless claims in the last five weeks, the very urgency of the problem has made it hard for Americans to tap into vital and promised assistance.

Millions of unemployment claims are being processed successfully, yet experiences with jammed phone lines, website glitches, and weekslong delays have been nearly as common. The problems partly reflect flawed or outdated software, and partly they reveal a failure of imagination: that a major economic shock could hit so many workers so quickly. The race to help the unemployed is teaching hard lessons in readiness for a benefit widely viewed as an “automatic stabilizer” in economic hard times.

“Right now, for a majority of [jobless] people, unemployment compensation benefits are the only form of income they’re going to have access to,” says Julia Simon-Mishel, the supervising attorney for the unemployment compensation unit at Philadelphia Legal Assistance. “There has been a lack of attention nationwide to this program, so of course states are struggling to process this incredible number of claims.”