He needs jobless benefits. He was told to find a fax machine

Mohammed Saiful Islam got a taste of how antiquated the technology that runs New York state’s unemployment insurance system is when he had to go to a Staples store in the middle of a pandemic to fax his pay stubs to Albany.

Islam, a Lyft driver who lives in Queens and has been idled by the outbreak, is among more than 450,000 New Yorkers who have tried, often in vain, to apply for unemployment benefits in the past three weeks.

As he and many others discovered, the state’s archaic systems were woefully unprepared for the deluge of claims. In Islam’s case, he said it took him four days to reach someone who could explain what he had to do to complete the application process.

State officials admitted as recently as last summer that there were problems with the technology used for such applications, describing New York’s unemployment insurance systems as relics from the heyday of mainframe computers.

The software programs that run the systems were “written in the 1970s and 1980s and remain constrained by the technology of that era,” officials wrote while seeking bids as part of a planned modernisation project.

In March, when hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs had suddenly evaporated started trying to log on to the Labour Department website or call its phone lines, the systems failed.

Would-be applicants’ frustration grew as their computer screens froze repeatedly and their calls went unanswered for days. Some attempts to apply for benefits yielded a pop-up message that suggested using Netscape, a browser that effectively no longer exists.

Islam, who had never applied for jobless benefits in the 35 years since he immigrated from Bangladesh, said he was taken aback to hear that he had to find a fax machine to complete his claim.

But he put on a face mask and gloves and warily trudged off to a Staples store. Late this week, he was still waiting to hear how much he would receive and when.

“Scary things are going on in our life right now,” Islam, 49, said in an interview from the home he shares with his wife and four children.

New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, acknowledged the problems with the unemployment claims process Tuesday.

Elizabeth Lucia, who is several months pregnant, lost two jobs on the same night last month, at her home in Vestal, NY, Apr 3, 2020. The New York Times

“I apologise for the pain,” Cuomo said at a news conference. “It must be infuriating to deal with.”

The Labour Department, he said, had received 1.2 million calls the day before, after getting more than 7 million calls last week. But the state reported just 80,000 claims for the week that ended March 20 and just 370,000 last week, far fewer than either California and Pennsylvania reported.

“The staff at the Department of Labor are killing themselves to try to deal with this situation,” said Richard Blum, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society who advocates for worker protections and benefits. “But the problems that they and applicants are facing are the results of long-term disinvestment in the system.

Department officials did not respond to repeated inquiries about the computer systems.

New York is not the only state having trouble handling the tidal wave of unemployment claims.

On Thursday, the executive director of Florida’s Department of Economic Opportunity publicly apologised after the state’s unemployment website failed. Auditors had warned the governor, Ron DeSantis, about problems with the website last year.

Connecticut has a backlog that could take five weeks to process because its computer system is also at least 40 years old, said Nancy Steffens, a spokeswoman for the state’s Labor Department.

Steffens said that Connecticut has had to resort to recruiting retirees who knew how to program in COBOL, a nearly extinct computer language. Connecticut and four other states are involved in a joint project meant to overhaul their systems, but it will not be finished before next year, she said.

New York is not part of that effort.

In 2017, the state sought bids for a “solution” to its unemployment insurance system. Last year, it awarded a $56 million, five-year contract for that solution to Tata Consultancy Services, which is based in Mumbai.

In a subsequent solicitation last July, the state used similar wording to describe its “outdated and expensive mainframe-based” systems, suggesting that the modernisation effort would take more time.

The repeated crashing of New York’s online application system was a relatively minor setback for Elizabeth Lucia, considering what she has been through lately. Lucia, who is 30 and several months pregnant, lost two jobs on the same night last month.

After Cuomo ordered nonessential work to stop, she could no longer do either her main job, at the furniture chain Raymour & Flanigan, or her side gig in real estate sales. Raymour & Flanigan later furloughed her, but the company said it would keep her on its health insurance plan.

Lucia, who lives in Vestal, New York, heard recently that property showings were still allowed, but she decided to stay home anyway.

“I need to be healthy to give birth in a month,” she explained.

Now, she said, she was counting on unemployment checks to cover her rent and mounting expenses.

“I already have a medical bill in the mail for $1,100 that I’m trying to figure out what to do with,” she said, adding that “getting unemployment would be a matter of sinking or swimming.”

Navigating the Labour Department’s overloaded system has been a challenge even for tech-savvy applicants like Eric Saari, who said he had once designed mobile apps for IBM.

Saari, 50, said he worried that he might become homeless if he was unable to get unemployment benefits. He had been driving a taxi in Saratoga Springs, New York, until early March, when a visibly ill passenger wearing a mask said he might have the virus.

Saari quit driving after that and said he was down to his last several hundred dollars, which he needed to buy food for the next month. He has tried seven different websites and the phone numbers of at least three government agencies to try to get help filing a claim, he said.

“Right now,” he said, “it’s unfortunately impossible, as far as I can tell.”

Congress has promised those who are now unemployed especially generous benefits for the next few months: $600 a week through July on top of what they would typically get from their home states.

But New York residents stand to collect less than recipients in nearby states. The maximum weekly benefit in New York is $504 a week, compared with $631 in Connecticut, $713 in New Jersey and $823 in Massachusetts.

“New York’s benefits system is unusually stingy,” said Paul Sonn, the state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for low-wage workers. Despite the state’s progressive image, Sonn said, “New York is not a leading state in providing economic security for jobless workers.”

But the $2 trillion stimulus package that Congress approved has made far more people eligible for unemployment benefits, including artists and other freelancers, said Nicole Salk, senior staff attorney at South Brooklyn Legal Services.

She said she had been counselling some people about how to apply for benefits and avoid pitfalls in the process.

New York, she added, also had a distinctly punitive approach when calculating benefits for part-time workers that withholds 25% of what they receive in a week for each day they work, no matter how many hours they put in.

That means that if an unemployed actress spent just an hour or two a day three days a week delivering groceries for a service like Instacart, she would forfeit 75% of her weekly check.

The rule, which is inconsistent with how other states handle part-time work, gives unemployed New Yorkers a strong incentive to remain idle while they collect benefits, Salk said.

Legislation to change the rule appeared to have the support of Cuomo and legislative leaders last year, she said, but no bill was ever signed into law.

Blum said he was told why: The Labor Department’s primitive computers could not be reprogrammed quickly enough to make the adjustment.

© 2020 New York Times News Service