Shared Work Unemployment Insurance Story: It gets better!

Okay, so this morning an HR rep called from the Great Desert University in response to my rant about Chase’s declining the debit card that came from the Unemployment Insurance folks. As you’ll recall, Chase was unable to disgorge the $48 the supposedly valid card supposedly contains.

You know, every time you think Big Bureaucracy gets as ridiculous as it is possible for the human animal to get, some bureaucracy outdoes itself.

My whine was the first complaint our HR rep had heard about this, but apparently it’s not going to be the last. In the course of discussion, she said the problem no doubt is that the card contains no payment, even though we’re past the week-long waiting period and past the second furlough pay period and so I am now eligible to start receiving Unemployment Insurance payments. This is because the university so far has not received the forms from UI that it must fill out and return to make the payments start happening.

Furthermore, she said, she was horrified to discover that the Department of Economic Security (DES), the state office that administers Unemployment Insurance here, is not online. When she was asked to send required information on all of ASU’s furloughed employees, she offered to send an electronic file.

No, she was told: they have no way of receiving electronic files. They have to enter all the information the old-fashioned way: legions of data-entry clerks punch in every number and character, copied off of hard-copy documents. They made her FAX 199 pages of data! Those FAXes contained employees’ names, Social Security numbers, earnings, and other private information.

“Well,” I said, “Now we know where we can get jobs after we’re laid off!”

“Yeah,” she said, “if you want to be a data-entry clerk at DES!”

By the time we finished laughing about that, the implication of what she had said soaked in.

“They are typing all that stuff to disk? That’s going to take weeks!”

“You’d think so. I mentioned that to them,” she said. “They assured me it was no problem. Why, they said, they had just finished entering the data for a casino that laid off its employees, and that was 800 people.”

“Uhhmmm….”

“Yeah. I pointed out that GDU is not a casino…that we have 10,000 employees who are signing up for Shared Work.”

“My god.”

“She said not to worry, they would hire new people to do the work.”

“But the state is laying people off in every department!”

“That’s right.”

Anyway, she concluded that Chase must have declined the card because there’s no way it could have any money on it. She was amazed to learn that the teller could not access the account to see how much (if anything) it contained. But because there is no way DES could possibly have entered data for 10,000 of our employees yet, the most likely explanation is that they sent an empty debit card.

And chances are, none of us will see any of this money until after our furloughs are over and we’re receiving our full pay again.

We all live in a yellow submarine Monty Python Show.