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Without a doubt the questions I am asked by constituents of late are dominated by Maine’s overwhelmed system of Unemployment Compensation. These inquiries range from, “Why can’t I get through on the phone?” to “When can self-employed workers file a claim?”
The good news is that, despite the enormous surge in new claims that followed the COVID-19 outbreak in mid-March, the number of new claims has fallen from a high of nearly 31 ,000 applicants in the last week of March to about 11,000 last week. In all, Mainers have filed more than 100,000 new claims in the last six weeks. That represents about one in five of the private sector workers in our state.
[Our COVID-19 tracker contains the most recent information on Maine cases by county]
Another surge in claims is likely to occur when Maine allows new applications for benefits from those who have been self-employed, independent contractors, workers for certain religious groups, or those who have exhausted their eligibility. Under the new federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, these workers who were not eligible in the past can now receive benefits.
Across the nation, there are stories about ways in which state governments have gone to extraordinary lengths to provide relief to their struggling citizens.
On April 17, Vermont’s governor promised that if his state’s bogged down unemployment system was not fixed by April 18, he would pay $1,200 to everyone who was unable to successfully navigate the system. On April 20, he ordered the State Treasurer to send checks to more than 8,300 Vermonters to help them financially until the system could catch up.
During the first week of the surge in claims, New York saw massive increases in phone calls and web traffic. Their online application portal crashed, so the governor reached out to Google to help rebuild the system. At the same time, Verizon provided more than 9,000 new call ports to expand capacity. Two weeks later, when that new system came online, state employees made 470,000 follow-up calls reaching out to unemployed New Yorkers who had been locked out by the failed system.
Google says that the system could be used in other states.
Rhode Island, a state just three-quarters the size of Maine, had 40,000 more claims than our state in the first six weeks. Officials there saw early on that the huge influx would swamp their system, nearly identical to the one used here. In response, their Department of Labor and Training turned to experts at Amazon Web Services and Brown University to help develop a better program. Just three weeks into the surge, that new cloud-based system went live in their state and so far has processed 175,000 claims.
More than 30,000 of those claims fall under the new PUA program. This was possible because the state found a way to download state tax information so they could verify the eligibility of self-employed workers, allowing them to start paying PUA benefits weeks ago.
These tremendous success stories in which state governments went to extraordinary lengths to serve their citizens demonstrate the kind of response that I think Mainers deserve, but are not seeing. As late as last week, Maine’s Department of Labor indicated that the delivery of PUA benefits could still be weeks away and said they were still awaiting additional guidance from the federal government, even though more than two dozen other states were already taking new applications and many had begun paying benefits. Now the department says it hopes to begin accepting applications for the program this Friday, but with those 30,000 applications still not processed, this new group of applicants who have been waiting weeks for help are likely to further clog an overloaded system.
We must find a way to solve this problem.
If expert companies such as Amazon, Google, and Verizon can help in Maine, we need to reach out and take advantage of these resources immediately.
Our guiding principle should be: “Whatever it takes!”
In order to learn more about why Maine’s response lags so far behind other states in our region, Senate Republicans asked that the legislature’s Committee on Labor and Housing, on which I serve, convene in order to discuss the problem and potential solutions with Maine’s Commissioner of Labor.
Last Friday, the Legislature’s presiding officers agreed, and in a letter to Gov. Janet Mills asked that the commissioner appear before the committee to discuss these issues.
It is my hope that this meeting will lead to productive, effective, and rapid solutions for Maine’s unemployment crisis.
Stacey Guerin of Glenburn represents District 10 in the Maine Senate. She is the Republican lead on the Joint Standing Committee on Labor and Housing.
Watch: Maine CDC coronavirus press conference, April 29
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