Help is Long Overdue: Georgia residents have suffered extensive delays
in receiving unemployment benefits
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Esther Schrader | Read the full piece here
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Friend,
Their jobs at the trampoline park earned Constance and Jermaine
Summers just enough to get by.
Working for $12 an hour, the couple could squeeze out enough money to
continue renting their tiny mobile home in an Atlanta suburb, along
with monthly payments on the eight-year-old car they drove with care.
Their children, ages 12 and 13, had friends and space to play in the
mobile home community where they lived. When tips came their way, the
couple could buy the occasional treat for their kids.
But since last March, the family has lost almost everything.
As the pandemic raged, the trampoline park went dark and they were
laid off. At first, they got unemployment benefits. Then, with no
explanation, their unemployment payments stopped coming. The family
was evicted. Because the one-bedroom efficiency apartment they moved
into does not accept pets, they had to give their beloved family dog
to a local fire station.
What's more, they lost their car. Eventually both of them found
new jobs, but at considerably lower pay. Until the couple gets back on
their feet, their children are living with a relative in Texas.
It didn't have to be this way. If they had gotten the full
unemployment benefits they were entitled to, the couple could have
paid their bills until they landed new jobs. But like thousands of
Georgia residents whose livelihoods were upended by the pandemic, they
were let down by the Georgia Department of Labor (GDOL), whose extreme
delays in processing, paying and hearing appeals on unemployment
claims have opened broad tears in the social safety net.
The family learned later that their unemployment payments stopped
because their employer had appealed their eligibility for benefits.
The family has appealed the disqualification but has not yet received
a hearing date.
"It's supposed to be a bridge, the unemployment system,
but it threw us off a cliff, it was no bridge," Jermaine
Summers, 40, said. According to his estimates, he is owed about 17
weeks of benefits, or about $7,000. His wife, he says, should have
received about $15,000.
"I've worked since I was 15 in the state of Georgia, and
for me to have poured all that money into this system and to see how
my life has fallen by the wayside when I need the help most,
it's a slap in the face," he said. "I'm not
looking for a handout but I mean, right is right and wrong is wrong,
and this is extremely wrong."
Seeking to have that wrong made right for people across Georgia who
find themselves in similar straits, the Southern Poverty Law Center
announced in June that it, along with its co-counsel at Bondurant,
Mixson, and Elmore LLP, is representing a group of residents who are
suing GDOL, Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler, and the state of
Georgia. The suit argues that major delays on unemployment claims
filed during the pandemic violate state and federal law.
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