Unemployment update: 1 million North Carolinians have now filed for jobless benefits
More than 1 million North Carolinians have filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March, when coronavirus-related closures started going into place.
That means more than one in every five people in the entire state labor force have lost their jobs in the last six weeks.
“We really are in somewhat uncharted territory,” said Lockhart Taylor, the head of the state unemployment agency, at a recent meeting with state lawmakers.
Taylor said North Carolina had around 100,000 new jobless claims a month at the height of the Great Recession a decade ago. Now it has had 10 times that many, in under two months.
That strain on the system has led to numerous complaints from people who have reported website glitches, or phone lines that automatically hang up on them.
The unemployment office has responded by tripling its staff, and in late April it started allowing people to call in on the weekends for the first time ever.
But the complaints have not let up. On Saturday April 25, when the weekend hours began, Kannapolis resident David Exum told the News & Observer he called multiple times but still couldn’t get through.
The unemployment website is also encumbered, the News & Observer reported last month, which had led to both the desktop and mobile versions of the site being slow.
Three types of federal benefits
So far, out of the million people to have filed for unemployment, just under 450,000 have been approved to start receiving benefits. And for those people, the state has since paid out more than $1.2 billion in benefits. That money has mostly come from the federal government and the extra unemployment benefits Congress included in a coronavirus aid package passed in March.
There are three types of federal benefits. One goes to people who also qualify for state benefits, one goes to people who don’t qualify for state benefits, and one goes to people who have already exhausted their state benefits.
And depending on what type of job people have lost, the benefits response has looked very different.
People who qualified for state benefits may have started receiving payments a month ago, in early April. Not all did, but that’s when the first round of payments began.
But for people who don’t qualify for state benefits but do qualify for federal benefits — which includes all self-employed people like independent contractors, freelancers and gig economy workers — the benefits have been slower. Of the $1.2 billion in benefits paid out so far, less than 10% has gone to those types of workers.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
This story was originally published May 4, 2020 at 10:29 AM with the headline "Unemployment update: 1 million North Carolinians have now filed for jobless benefits."
