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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In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center