The state unemployment systems that were supposed to help millions of jobless workers were full of boxes to check and mandates to meet that couldn’t possibly apply in a pandemic, the New York Times reported. States required workers to document their job searches, weekly; to register with employment services, in person; to take a wait period before their first check, up to 10 days. Such requirements increased in the years following the Great Recession, as many states moved to tighten access to or reduce unemployment benefits. With them, most states cut the share of jobless workers they helped. Now these requirements have been getting in the way. Effectively, many states have been trying to scale up aid with systems built to keep claims low. “In a time when pretty much everybody who’s applying should be eligible, we’re working with a system that got us to a 26 percent recipiency rate,” said Steve Gray, the director of Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency. That means Michigan was giving aid to one in four unemployed workers in 2019, following restrictions adopted by the Michigan legislature after the Great Recession. That system, Gray said, was “built to assume that you’re guilty and make you prove that you’re innocent.” The crush of claims has demanded of states not just more server capacity and call-center workers, but also an abrupt change in the premise of the safety net: Systems trained to treat each case as potentially fraudulent must now presume that millions have legitimately lost their jobs.
