With State Unable To Keep Up With Unemployment Claims, Gov. JB Pritzker Says Improvements 'Still A Work In Progress'
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Acknowledging that the state's unemployment system has been "a source of hardship for all too many Illinois residents" over the past several weeks amid the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. JB Pritzker said his administration is continuing to work to speed up the process of filing claims by phone or online.
"So many families are hurting at a scale that this country hasn't seen ever in our lifetime, and our state unemployment filing systems – which were built a decade ago for a much lower number of claims – simply haven't kept pace," Pritzker said Monday at his daily COVID-19 briefing. "I would say that this is still a work in progress, there's no doubt about it; much better than it was, much better than it was."
The governor said, for the five weeks from March 1 to April 4, Illinois received 513,173 initial unemployment claims, more than all of 2019. He said that's also a 400% increase above the total initial unemployment claims filed in Illinois during the first five weeks of the Great Recession in 2008.
Pritzker said, since March 1, the Illinois Department of Employment Security website has fielded over 6.5 million sessions, and the department's call center, staffed by 173 people, has processed thousands of calls per day.
IDES has increased phone capacity by 40% to reduce wait times, and the state also is establishing an outside call center staffed with 200 agents to help with claims. The state's unemployment website also has been completely overhauled, and moved to new hardware, to significantly increase capacity, according to Pritzker. The governor's office also has brought in outside partners from the private sector to expand web capacity and capability.
"They're doing in weeks what normally would take a year," he said.
The state also has sped up the application process by removing some verification checks and replacing them with faster methods, he said.
IDES has assigned hundreds of employees to work around the clock to respond to claims as fast as possible. A total of 539 IDES employees who had been working from home are now working from state offices each day to process claims, and have worked 6,500 hours of overtime to process and pay more than 270,000 new unemployment claims, totaling more than $200 million in payments, according to Pritzker.
The department also has brought back retired staffers, and provided them with laptops to allow them to work from home to help with unemployment claims.
Pritzker said, as part of the federal coronavirus stimulus package, 1099-independent contractors, gig workers, and other self-employed workers who previously had been ineligible for unemployment can apply for federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. The state is still working with an outside contractor to set up a new website that will be required to process those claims, and expects to have the first payments go out by the week of May 11.
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