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unemployment insurance

Missing unemployment payment accounted for

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Okay, so we’re all sitting in this auditorium jam-packed with furloughed Great Desert University employees, listening to the HR people and a couple of gurus from Department of Economic Security telling us how we can access the unemployment insurance that is supposed to cover the twice-monthly furlough days. 

At one point, the DES guy says, “You’ll get a debit card, and your benefits will be deposited to this debit card.”

A groan rises from the audience and fills the hall.

“Oh, I guess you don’t care for debit cards?”

No joke, says someone. 

So, can we ask to have a check sent to us or to get direct deposit? someone else asks.

“Yes,” he says, “you can ask for direct deposit by going to the Web site, downloading a form, filling it out, and sending to DES along with a canceled check. But the first payment defaults to the Chase debit card, and there’s nothing we can do about that.”

We will, we’re given to understand, either have to spend the money on the debit card at retailers or go to an ATM or the bank and ask to have it in cash. But, we’re told, we must be careful, because Chase has a number of gotchas, and will charge fees for any number of arcane reasons. Read the paperwork that comes with it carefully.

Ducky.

I filled in the forms to claim unemployment, and within a couple of weeks a debit card arrived. At first, it developed, no money was on it because DES sent the cards out before they even got the data on ASU’s employees; since the agency is not online, it would take several weeks to manually keyboard information on several thousand furloughed employees. Eventually, enough time passed that I started to see the requested direct deposits appear in my checking account, so I figured the initial deposit must be there; all I wanted to do was retrieve it and move it into savings, there to wait for the day in December when I will be canned.

After several frustrating tries, I finally gave up. It simply would not disgorge the money, and no one at two different branches knew why or what to do about it. 

So, I mailed the damn thing to DES and asked them to return whatever money they’d put on the card to the federal government, to whom it belonged.

LOL!

Weeks later, along comes this message from an assistant director at that august agency:

The week ending February 7, 2009 was your mandatory, nonpaid waiting week. Your next Shared Work week was the week ending February 21, 2009; this was the first paying week of your Shared Work benefits. Because your employer’s certification for that week [was?] on March 16, 2009, the order to move your benefit payments from your debit card to your bank account had already taken place on March 9, 2009. [Is there logic here? Where?] The benefit payment was not made to your debit card, but to your bank account on March 17, 2009. The reason your Chase debit card could not pay your $48.00 is because no funds were ever put into that account.

Reason is because…oh, God, I hope you were never in one of my required writing classes…

That distraction aside, why on earth did DES tell us that the first payment would default to the debit card, no matter what, no questions asked, no rebellion brooked? But then…what on earth does this person’s message mean, anyway: GDU asked that I be paid on March 16, and so DES paid me on March 9? Hey: who needs to be online when you’ve got a crystal ball?

WhatEVER. Apparently giving away the debit card was giving away nothing.

More on unemployment insurance ripoffs

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Remember that I mentioned the Unemployment Insurance representative told us, during the 90-minute chivaree in which all us furloughed Great Desert University employees were to sign up for the Shared Work program, that we should be careful of the various “fees and penalties” Chase Bank was likely to charge against the required debit card we would be given? Well, the guy wasn’t kidding.

CNN runs an article today detailing exactly how many gouges the banks are digging out of Americans’ unemployment benefits: 40 cents for the privilege of asking how much remains in your balance; 50 cents if they deny your card; 35 cents to access your account by phone. According to this report, ripoffs range from around 40 cents to as much as $3 per transaction.

These, we may note, are being coughed up to the very institutions whose executives are using the taxpayers’ TARP money to frolic in fancy resorts and fly around the country in private jets.

Oh, yeah, speaking of gouges: you get to pay income taxes on your unemployment insurance, too.

Talk about a Nation of Sheep. I can’t believe we’re not at the barricades!

The William E. Morris Institute, a nonprofit that represents low-income people in court pro bono, is spearheading a class-action suit against Arizona’s Department of Economic Services, which administers Unemployment Insurance disbursements here (after a fashion). The complaint is that DES isn’t processing claims fast enough—or, in some cases, at all. That’s not surprising, given the agency’s antediluvian operations.

It’s good to hear that someone, somewhere, is trying to put these clowns’ feet to the fire. What’s amazing, to my mind, is that we don’t have riots in the streets. But I guess as long as we can afford our cable bill, we can keep sucking on our pacifier. What, us worry?

Shared Work Unemployment Insurance Story: It gets better!

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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.

Unemployment + Chase Bank = Hell on Wheels

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LOL! I just KNEW it!

As you may recall, my beloved employer, the Great Desert University, did its level best to ameliorate the pain of the unpaid furlough days it’s forcing us all to take by entering a Shared Work arrangement with the Unemployment Insurance Service.

This sounds great…on paper.Reality is a slightly different matter.

Although UI will, in due course, direct-deposit your money to a bank account of your choice, the first payment defaults to a debit card with Chase Bank.

Can you spell sweetheart deal, boys and girls?

I don’t use debit cards; I don’t want to use a debit card; I just want to get the $48 that allegedly has been deposited to this card out of Chase Bank and into my sweaty little paws, so I can carry it to the credit union and deposit it to a savings account, where it and the promised future direct deposits can sit until we see whether I get laid off or not. So, here’s what happens when I try to extract said munificent sum:

Dear ASK HR:

The debit card from Chase came in the mail, issued in response to the request for Shared Work payment for furlough days. I called the phone number on the information that came with the card. After about 15 minutes of jumping through punch-a-button hoops, I validated the card and got the access number and the PIN number.

 

For a number of reasons, I do not use debit cards. I have a credit union account, to which I asked to have the payments due me direct-deposited. Yes, I DO understand that the first payment cannot be direct-deposited. So now I have $48 on this debit card, which I would like to extract from Chase and manually deposit, in person, at the Arizona State Credit Union.

 

I drove to the nearest Chase branch. It is in a dangerous part of town where I would not ordinarily get out of my car—it is, shall we say, a lock-your-car-doors district. Stood in line interminably at the teller’s. Explained the situation, asked to withdraw the $48 that is supposed to be on the card. Jumped through some more hoops. And then what? She informed me the card was rejected. By now I’ve spent another half-hour dorking with this, for a total of 45 minutes.

 

Now she wants me to go to customer service, where I will be asked to dial the phone number on the card (which is the same punch-a-button hoop-jump number that has already fruitlessly consumed a quarter-hour of my time). I explain that I have work to do, and that the last time I called that number, there was no option to reach a person.

 

Back at my own phone, I dial a number for Chase listed on GetHuman.com. Eventually, I reach a person in the auto loan department. He connects me with a human being: in Pakistan or India!

 

Okay. After waiting 16 minutes to get through to this person, I explain the situation. He says he will connect me to a person in the Unemployment Office in Illinois. I explain that even though Unemployment Insurance is a federal program, in the U.S. it is administered by each state separately and that each state’s system is different, and so it will not do me any good to talk to the Illinois unemployment people. That notwithstanding, he insists on giving me a number in the Unemployment Office in Illinois. I hang up in frustration.

 

This little runaround has now occupied a good hour and a half of my time, not counting the time used fruitlessly to call a phone number at HR whose talking machine hung up on me before I could explain the issue. Nor does it count the 90 minutes spent sitting in a meeting listening to ASU and Unemployment Insurance representatives explain how to work the system, nor does it count the time I spent filling out forms.

 

When I’m working at ASU, I’m paid about $30 an hour. Thus, it has cost $45 worth of my time at ASU’s rate to try to extract $48 allegedly due to me. To make things more interesting, my actual, real-life freelance rate is $60 an hour. So, the truth is, I have now spent $90 worth of my time in an effort to retrieve $48 that has already been paid to me but which Chase will not disgorge.

 

I’m going to give up and write off the $48—I just don’t have time to kill this way. However, I would like someone to know how furious it makes me. I do not like to have my time wasted, and I especially resent being barred from retrieving unemployment insurance that I have paid for with my taxes and my employer has paid for with its taxes.

 

HR’s effort to cut through red tape and ameliorate the pain of the furlough days was a very good try and much appreciated by those of us who feel worried about our jobs and beat-up by the economy in general. However, it appears your time was every bit as much wasted as mine was. If a human being reads this message and has any clue how to reach an English-speaking human being at Chase (NOT another punch-a-button machine, NOT a foreign national who has no clue what I’m talking about!), please advise.

Don’t you love it?

Truth to tell, the exploit in the sub-working-class neighborhood where Chase directed me to its closest bank was as nothing compared to the misguided junket to our neighborhood Albertson’s, where I incorrectly thought the branch was located (they did used to have some branch bank in there, but it’s gone now—I won’t go into that store because it’s unsafe, and so I’d not noticed the bank’s removal). Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR cop cars were lined up in front, a couple of them left with their engines running. Inside, a gaggle of police officers were huddled with a guy who pretty clearly was a vic’ and not a perp. I surmised that he must have been robbed or at least pounced in the parking lot. Charming. Asked after the bank branch and was told to proceed deeper into the slum. And so, onward and downward.

Let’s calculate how much the futile effort to retrieve my $48 really has cost.

Time consumed:
90 minutes: sitting in an informational meeting, filling out forms
15 minutes: navigating punch-a-button phone lines to validate debit card and obtain various secret numbers
30 minutes: driving to Chase branch and being repulsed
20 minutes: reaching a human being on a Chase telephone and being repulsed
15 minutes: writing the diatribe above
TOTAL: 170 minutes, or 2.83 hours

Value of my time as a GDU employee: $30/hour
Value of my time on a freelance basis: $60/hour

Value of time, at taxpayer rate, wasted while I tried to retrieve $48 supposedly already paid to me: $84.90

Value of time, at freelance rate, wasted while I tried to retrieve $48 supposedly already paid to me: $169.80

Tell me: is there anyone out there who doesn’t believe we’re living in a Monty Python show?

“Shared Work”: It has some advantages

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So this morning I made it to a ninety-minute presentation on Shared Work, the Unemployment Service’s plan to provide a modicum of compensation for people who are being furloughed instead of flat laid off. In a nutshell, if your employer cooperates you can get unemployment compensation for those days that you’re not paid on your job. Within limits. The scheme has some nice advantages over regular full unemployment compensation, but it retains a few of the old program’s drawbacks.

Plusses are significant:

You do not have to reapply for every week in which you have a furlough day. Your employer takes responsibility for informing the bureaucracy of the days your pay is docked. That cuts an enormous amount of red tape and hassle.

You are allowed to earn income from a second job or from freelance gigs without losing the Shared Work benefit. This is a sharp contrast to regular unemployment insurance, which boots you off the system if you get so much as a day of back vacation pay.

If you manage not to be laid off and if you earn enough to get by on your reduced salary, you could in theory collect the ten or twelve weeks’ worth of payments and stash them, plumping your savings account a bit or using the money to pay down debt.

Cons are also significant:

These payments bite into your regular unemployment compensation, in the event that you do get laid off. If you collect, say, $400 from Shared Work, your unemployment entitlement will be cut by $400. This means that if you’re in the financial position that too many state employees find themselves in—below or right at the poverty line—and you have to use the Shared Work payments to make ends meet, you will suffer when you’re laid off.

The payments are piddling. The max payment would be something like $48 a day, barely enough to buy a bag of groceries—given that you will take off one day every two weeks.

To be eligible, you must be furloughed for at least 10% but not more than 40% of a given week. This means that if you take as many as 20 hours of furlough time in a week, you don’t collect a penny. In other words, you can’t bunch several or all of the furlough days together to give yourself a little unpaid vacation. Take off 16 hours or more, and you lose the compensation.

The default mode of payment is a debit card issued by Chase Bank. The Unemployment Service’s spokesman warned, in no uncertain terms, that these cards have all sorts of strings designed to nick and gouge users, including limits on where you can use the things, how you can use them, and how many times you can use them. To get the government to direct-deposit the payments, you have to fill out yet another form (we filled out seven pages of forms today, including one that gave the gummint permission to examine all of our bank account activities). It takes two weeks or so to put your request in action.

As with regular unemployment compensation, you have to sit out a one-week “waiting period” after your first day of eligibility. This means you will not and cannot be paid for your first furlough day. So instead of receiving Shared Wages for 12 days, GDU employees will get it for 11 days. It smacks of another right-wing whack at the working poor, highly offensive in my view. If you’re unemployed for x days, you should collect Unemployment Insurance for x days, not for x – y days.

It certainly adds insult to injury. We’re the ones who are suffering from the shenanigans perpetrated by outfits like Chase, and now we have to pay the SOBs for the privilege of using our own unemployment insurance? That truly does stink.

But hey! Beggars can’t be choosers, eh?

Anyway, there it is. Better than nothing, I guess. Better than being canned now instead of later.

Update: It now begins to look as though at least the first payment from the Unemployment Insurance Service, a munificent $48 on $240 lost to a day’s furlough, may never be retrievable. Stay tuned for more entertainment.

Should I apply for unemployment?

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The Great Desert University has been approved for an unemployment insurance program called Shared Work. Basically it means that furloughed employees can collect unemployment for the unpaid furlough days we’re being forced to take off.

On the surface, it looks like a good idea. But there are some potential drawbacks.

First, unemployment eligibility has been extended to 59 weeks, which is about 14 months. That’s good. Because…this Shared Work program uses up your unemployment eligibility. Between now and June 30, we’re required to take 12 days—that’s 2 1/2 weeks. There’s no guarantee that GDU will not continue this furlough business into the next fiscal year; in fact, most of us think it will be used to engineer a permanent pay cut. If you use up your unemployment one day at a time, by the time you really need it to buy groceries, you could find yourself with little or no unemployment money left.

Many more layoffs are coming. First you get the furlough, then you get canned. It may be better to defer unemployment for the time when you really are unemployed.

Too, this looks like a huge hassle. To get regular unemployment, you can apply online. In Arizona, the Shared Work Program requires you to fill out a hard-copy form and physically file it. And since no one knows when you’re likely to quit or be laid off, it’s logical to think that you couldn’t apply for a whole chunk of projected furlough days. Likely you have to fill out and hand-deliver a form for each and every day.

The amount of weekly unemployment I would get under the best of circumstances is tiny. If and when I’m canned, I’ll need every penny I can scrounge up. If in fact you have to fill out and deliver a hard-copy form every week that you’re furloughed, it may not be worth the hassle to collect the minuscule amount I would get for one furlough day, and, since my position is nontenurable and very much at risk, it may be a bad idea to jump the gun on collecting unemployment.

Should I grab the money and run, taking a chance that I will not be laid off? Or wait and see?