Unemployment purgatory? She’s spent 130 hours on the phone trying to get out of it.
“Thank you for calling South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce. May I have your first and last name?”
“Hi. It’s Christie Biggers.”
“Thank you, Ms. Biggers. Could you please verify your last employer, including the start and end date of that employment?”
“Sure, it’s Southern Shade Tree Company. I was hired there in December of 2014. I was laid off due to COVID on July 6th, 2020.”
“Thank you very much, ma’am. And how may I assist you today?”
“I need to check on my account. It’s been on hold for almost 16 weeks.”
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As Christie Biggers wades into this phone conversation, there’s a sweet calmness in her voice that belies the fact that she feels like she might be on the verge of a breakdown — that she kind of wants to cry and kind of wants to scream.
After all, the Matthews wife and mother of two daughters and a stepdaughter has been down this road with the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce enough times to make almost anyone distraught.
Since losing her job as director of IT at a Fort Mill, S.C.-based landscaping company nearly four months ago, Biggers’ out-of-state claim (aka an interstate claim) seems to have gotten inexplicably stuck in the government’s system.
In her attempt to get it unstuck, she says she has made dozens of calls and spent an estimated 130 hours on the phone, either talking to representatives via the S.C. DEW’s online filing assistance line or — more often — waiting on hold. She says she’s been told her case has been “escalated to compliance” over and over. Even worse, she says, the representatives often just transfer her to other representatives until she hits a dead end with one of them or is disconnected, and on multiple occasions has been given phone numbers to call that belong to small businesses and restaurants.
And after all of this, she says, she is no closer to receiving her first check than she was in early July.
But there is one difference between what she was dealing with then and what she’s dealing with now: Then, she was hopeful she’d find another job relatively quickly and that her unemployment benefits would keep her family going in the interim. Now, job prospects seem grim, but worse, she and her husband are flirting with financial ruin as they struggle to make the rent and put food on the table — with what feels like no end in sight.
If her claim is finally approved, says the 41-year-old Biggers, “that would solve a lot of issues. By all rights I should receive the money. But I’m afraid to even count on it at this point. I just don’t know what’s gonna happen. I have no assurances. And that’s a scary place to be as the mom of kids who are counting on me — especially a disabled kid who’s counting on me.”
Biggers has two daughters — Ava, 15, and Emma, 8 — from a previous relationship, while her husband, Brian, has a daughter named Piper, who is 10. Ava has autism, obsessive compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
“We’re trying to put our fingers in the holes in the boat to keep things floating at the moment,” she says. “But we’re running out of options.”
Getting off to a bad start
“I was told that it was escalated to compliance. I was wondering if anything had come of that.”
“Let’s see, Ms. Biggers. OK, yes, someone tried to have it escalated, for the issue to be removed.”
“Mm-hmm. I’ve been told that it has been escalated like 23 times.”
“Well, I’m just trying to review the account and see what I can do right now, because sometimes when people call in they say, ‘Oh, I’ve had an issue for so long’ — but they kind of exaggerate.”
“I’m definitely not exaggerating.”
“Yeah, it looks like it’s literally from the start.”
“It’s literally from the start.”
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Considering that she worked for a landscaping company, and considering that consumers tightening their belts during a pandemic could decide professional landscaping was an unnecessary luxury, Biggers figured her job might be in jeopardy.
So she wasn’t overly surprised upon being told by Southern Shade Tree owner Brent Lovett on the Monday after the Fourth of July that he had no choice but to lay her off.
Allison Norris, Southern Shade Tree’s director of human resources, confirms that Biggers was among several employees laid off “related to concerns about the impact of the COVID pandemic on our business,” adding that “she left in good standing.”
Biggers was certainly sad about it, though, and couldn’t hold back the tears after Lovett broke the news. She says Lovett and others at the company had become like family since he hired her in 2014, when she had to re-enter the workforce after years as a stay-at-home mom and the sudden death of her fiance (father of Ava and Emma) by heart attack.
But she had good reason to stay positive. Her husband still had his job managing the Woodie’s Auto Service shop in Mint Hill, they had some money saved, and at the time, the federal coronavirus unemployment relief program was still providing a $600 weekly bonus payment to qualified Americans.
Almost immediately, she set out doing what she thought she needed to do.
She filed her claim the same day. (Norris says Southern Shade Tree promptly signed off on what S.C. DEW needed from the company to approve her claim.) The following Monday, via S.C. DEW’s web portal, Biggers completed her first weekly certification — basically the form the state uses to confirm that claimants should receive the unemployment benefits for that week.
It asks claimants to certify that they remain unemployed, that they are able to work, that they’re available for work and willing to take any suitable offer, and that they have actively searched for suitable work during that week.
Or, at least, it’s supposed to ask claimants all of those things. Biggers, however, was not given an option by the web portal to indicate whether she had actively searched for work that first week. (She had.)
On July 20, two weeks after Biggers was laid off, S.C. DEW notified her that her claim had been approved. That can happen independently, however, of certifications being processed through the system, and that happened in Biggers’ case. A week later, when she called the help line to try to figure out why she wasn’t receiving payments, she was informed that her account had been flagged and put on hold because the system said she hadn’t indicated she’d been looking for work.
“I explained that I did,” Biggers says. “And the first lady that I got was actually quite rude. She said, ‘You’re just not paying attention to the questions that you’re being asked.’”
No, Biggers explained, the question about looking for work simply wasn’t being asked at all.
After persisting, she was finally told by the representative that her case would be “escalated to compliance.”
The nightmare had officially begun.
Spiraling toward financial ruin
“I honestly don’t know what else to do, Ms. Biggers. In a situation like this, escalating to compliance is my only option. I know you’ve been escalated numerous times — I can see that. I don’t understand why they haven’t resolved it yet.”
“I don’t either. We share that.”
“Sixteen weeks is just entirely too long. But like I said, I will have it escalated again. Have you spoken to anyone from compliance?”
“No. I’ve asked for their number, but I keep being told that I can’t dial in, that they can only call me.”
“Yeah, there isn’t a direct line for the actual department. But the fraud department and compliance kind of work hand in hand. I can give you the number for the fraud department.”
“OK. I am ready when you are.”
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Biggers appears to have met all of the required guidelines for submitting weekly certifications but has repeatedly fallen victim to a technical glitch and an apparently confused and/or unhelpful group of representatives employed by the S.C. DEW.
She has shared with the Observer extensive documentation related to her attempts to get her claim resolved — evidence that the system doesn’t ask her if she’s looked for work, evidence that she has indeed been looking for work, detailed call logs, recordings of calls with representatives — and invited the Observer to listen in on calls made to the online filing assistance line.
As of last week, the S.C. DEW’s automated system stated that Biggers’ “remaining benefit amount is $6,520.”
She says she’s confused about whether that number includes bonuses she was eligible for via the various now-expired federal COVID programs, but she also says that at this point, “I’d be happy to take anything that they would actually give me.”
Four months ago, she and her husband were both gainfully employed and feeling like they were finally getting close to being able to transition from renters to homeowners.
Today, their savings have been depleted, they’re behind on the rent and their utility bills (she says the only thing that will keep them from getting kicked out of their apartment if this keeps up is the eviction moratorium issued by the CDC and Trump administration), and they’re struggling to feed their three children.
Because they can’t afford health insurance, money that might otherwise have been there for food has gone to pay for the expensive medications needed to treat Ava as well as those needed to treat Christie Biggers’ Crohn’s disease. Just this month, she rode out a severe flare-up because she didn’t want to incur emergency room costs.
So every day, she says, she calls. Every day, she waits on hold. She tries to explain her situation as calmly as she can. And she hopes for the best while anticipating the worst.
The worst? “When I’m given a false phone number. I’ve been given the number to a veterinarian, a florist, a Zaxby’s. ...”
“This one woman I spoke with, she was extremely condescending and it seemed like I was bothering her. And I said, I just need a manager. A supervisor. Somebody in compliance. Anybody who can help. And she’s like, ‘Fine.’ Gives me a number. I made sure to have her repeat it. Then I called, and it was a travel agency. Poor little guy, he answered the phone and I said, ‘Uhh, this isn’t South Carolina unemployment, is it?’ And he said, ‘No, this is such and such travel agency.’ And I was like —”
Biggers lets out a low scream.
‘My life is on the line’
Good afternoon and thank you for calling the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce. How can I assist you?
Hi. I was told that this was the fraud department, is that correct?
Yes, ma’am.
OK, I was given this number because my case has been escalated to compliance multiple times over a 16-week period. I haven’t received a single payment.
I mean, this is the fraud department. Compliance, they’re the ones that actually investigate the case.
I’m just saying, she gave me this number and asked for me to reach out and see if there’s anything anyone in fraud could do, because she said that fraud works hand in hand with compliance.
Well, whatever the issue it is that you’re having on the case, it’s gone over to compliance today. She’s already escalated it. So she’s already done what we would have done in reference to your case.
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A river of similar complaints has flooded the S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce’s Facebook page since the pandemic began, continuing even as the number of people unemployed in the state has steadily declined since peaking at more than 300,000 in April.
Complaints come from those who say, like Biggers, that they’ve gone months without receiving unemployment benefits; those who say, like Biggers, that they have experienced long hold times and been disconnected after those long hold times; and those who, like Biggers, say their cases have been snagged by web portal glitches.
None of the posts has received a direct response from the S.C. DEW, and if you send a message through the page, it generates an automated response referring you to the phone number that most of the people are complaining about.
Contacted by email on Friday afternoon, S.C. DEW media relations specialist Heather Biance asked the Observer for Biggers’ claimant ID number and said she would have it reviewed by a claims specialist.
“They will review the claim and if there’s action that can be taken, there will be,” Biance said. On Monday morning, she said she hadn’t heard back yet but would follow up.
Meanwhile, on Monday morning in Matthews, Biggers was getting ready to make yet another call on yet another day without pay.
“I keep hoping that maybe they will get sick of pulling up my file and finally do something,” she said last Tuesday while waiting on hold, during a call that ended up lasting 95 minutes. “Eventually, they’re gonna have to get tired of talking to me. I’m tired of hearing myself talk.
“If this is happening to me, it has to be happening to others, and in a situation like COVID, in a situation like today’s climate, people’s lives are on the line. My life is on the line.
“It’s just extremely frustrating because everything was done exactly like it was supposed to be done, and the problem has absolutely nothing to do with me. It’s entirely their system that has me caught in unemployment purgatory.
“No one wants to be in this situation. No one wants to have to ask for help. It’s very hard to do. But when it’s a system that you ... always thought would be there for you, it’s — I don’t really even know how to describe it. You feel helpless and completely isolated.
“And no one seems to care.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 12:56 PM.
