‘It’s a mess’
Chairs hang stacked on empty tables at a closed restaurant in New York on March 16. U.S. companies shed 27,000 jobs in March, according to a private survey, a figure that mostly reflected the economy as it stood before the full impact of the viral outbreak. Payroll processor ADP said small businesses took the biggest hit, losing 90,000 jobs, while medium-sized and large companies still added workers. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
Years of low jobless rates left Idaho Department of Labor unprepared
It was the perfect storm.
Years of a rolling economy with record low unemployment across the board led the Idaho Department of Labor to drop its guard.
The department centralized its unemployment insurance to the main office in Boise, it quit cross-training its employees to help the public file claims, and new hires were no longer exposed to unemployment insurance filings, according to sources interviewed by The Press. The increase in filings in the final week of the month more than doubled, with people younger than 25 representing a disproportionate share of the total, according to the state.
Labor Department economist Kathryn Tacke said she watched as the department weathered the recession of the 1980s and the economic downturn of the late 2000s, but in both cases the department was prepared for unemployment insurance filings.
But this year, since the economy was so good, few people in Boise — or in Labor Department outposts across the state — were trained to deal with unemployment.
In addition, the state’s filing system was not upgraded to deal with the increased use of mobile devices, such as cellphones and tablets.
Laid-off workers a decade ago used computers at branch offices or at the library to file claims.
Those facilities are closed because of COVID-19 fears.
“Yeah, it’s a mess,” a former IDL employee who did not want to be identified told The Press. “And with the local offices closed and the library is closed, people don’t have a way to even file a claim unless they have a PC or a laptop. The system is not mobile friendly and you can’t use a phone or a tablet.”
By the end of March, almost 50,000 Idahoans had filed unemployment insurance claims as businesses across the Gem State closed in accordance to an order by the governor’s office. Gov. Brad Little’s list of essential businesses does not include much of the service and manufacturing industries, two of the biggest employers in the state.
The latest hit was not foreseen.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” Tacke said. “It happened so fast and it’s hitting so hard.”
The Labor Department has since made upgrades to its online filing system and taken other steps to handle the flood of calls, said Darlene Carnopis, a public information officer at IDL.
“We have added staff on the phones,” Carnopis said. “Our staff is trying to help as many people as it can.”
The phone lines, however, are still clogged, often giving callers a busy signal.
On Thursday, the department announced it upgraded its unemployment insurance claim filing system to allow filing from phones and tablets.
“Claimants can’t use IE (Internet Explorer), but Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and others are good, and it works on iPhone, Android Tablet,” Carnopis said.
Of claims filed in the last week of March, a third came from people in the Boise metro area.
Claims were filed predominantly — 55 percent — by people who had worked in accommodation, food services, health care and social assistance industries as well as retail trade, according to the department.
Blue collar industries with the highest percentage of new claims filed at the end of the month included mining — up 767 percent. Claims also jumped by 306 percent in manufacturing, and claims filed by people in the construction sectors increased 256 percent, although under the governor’s order construction is deemed essential.
The 32,941 initial claims filed in the last week of March represent a record number of claims filed in a week, and is up from 13,585 filed a week earlier, according to the department.
