The Oregon Employment Department is increasingly optimistic it will pay the state’s workers hundreds of millions of dollars in long-delayed jobless benefits by Thanksgiving.
Oregon is the only state in the nation that hasn’t paid the so-called “waiting week” money for the first week workers are out of a job. Congress authorized the payments in March but the employment department’s obsolete computer system has prevented Oregon from paying those safety net benefits.
Hundreds of thousands of Oregonians are owed hundreds of millions of dollars altogether, though the department hasn’t provided a specific estimate of what it owes. The department is “pretty confident” the money will start going out sometime in the next week, David Gerstenfeld, the employment department’s acting director, said on his regular media call Wednesday.
The money compensates people for their first week they are out of a job, a period not usually covered by unemployment insurance. Congress funded an exception to blunt the pandemic’s economic impact.
Recipients won’t need to do anything additional to receive their money and most should see their benefits through normal payment channels within a few days once payments start going out, according to Gerstenfeld.
About a quarter of those who are eligible for payments – including those who were receiving extended benefits, or those whose employers participated in Oregon’s Work Share program, may have to wait until the end of December for their money. A few with complicated claims may have to wait until sometime in January, but Gerstenfeld said they will still receive their full benefits.
(Self-employed workers who received benefits through the new Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program didn’t have a waiting week for their money.)
Last spring, the employment department resisted paying the waiting week benefits and would not commit to ever distributing the federal money to Oregon workers. Gov. Kate Brown reversed course under pressure from the state’s congressional delegation in April, but it’s taken seven additional months for the department to adapt its computers to pay the benefits.
Oregon has already paid out more than $5.6 billion in benefits since March, more in the last eight months than the prior nine years combined. The waiting week money will hit Oregonians’ bank accounts as the state girds for another economic blow from the pandemic.
On Wednesday, the state entered a two-week “freeze” that shuts down dine-in restaurant service and closes gyms in hopes of containing an unprecedented surge in coronavirus infections. (The freeze lasts for at least four weeks in Multnomah County, where infection rates are especially severe.)
The employment department projects the freeze could impact about 51,000 Oregonians’ jobs, though Gerstenfeld said at least some of those people were only working part time and were already receiving benefits as a result.
Others who are returning to the jobless rolls will have to restart their claims, which has been a fraught process throughout the pandemic. The department’s phone lines remain jammed, as they have been since March, so Gerstenfeld advised workers who have trouble with restarting their claim to use the department’s “Contact us” form to notify the department.
Oregon failed in the early months of the pandemic to pay hundreds of thousands of workers’ jobless claims, and even now tens of thousands are still waiting for their benefits. There are 22,300 claims stuck in a bureaucratic process called adjudication to confirm eligibility.
That adjudication backlog is down by more than half since the end of September and at the current pace the department is on pace to clear those claims by Christmas Eve. There are tens of thousands of other unresolved claims, though, including some that may need adjudication.
Further, two key federal unemployment benefits programs are due to expire on the day after Christmas – the PUA program for self-employed workers and a 13-week extension of benefits eligibility for regular claims.
A divided Congress has given no indication it will vote to extend those programs or provide other pandemic aid this year. So thousands of other jobless Oregonians could have their benefits severely reduced, or eliminated, as the resurgent pandemic bears down.
Note: The Oregonian furloughed its journalists for a week earlier in the pandemic. They, like other furloughed Oregonians, qualify for waiting week payments.
-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |
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November 19, 2020 at 06:44AM
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Oregon ‘pretty confident’ it will pay long-delayed waiting week money by Thanksgiving - OregonLive
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