From the article:
These headaches are not surprising to experts like Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst with the National Employment Law Project. The coronavirus may have been unexpected, Evermore said, but the collapse of unemployment systems in many states was not. Evermore published a prescient report in early March, warning that the depth of North Carolina’s cuts to its unemployment benefits and staffing had left the state unprepared for the next recession. “These systems that were undermined for the past decade are very hard to turn around,” she said, comparing the process to steering a barge.
Such an attempt to reverse course is precisely what’s happening in North Carolina right now. Since March, Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic governor, has signed several executive orders to temporarily remove some of the obstacles from the application process. The orders waive the requirement that applicants search for work; eliminate the one-week waiting period between filing for unemployment and receiving benefits; and allow employers to file claims for entire groups of workers who have been laid off. (The DES, according to Rhoades, its spokesman, has also acted to “improve its processes, technology and staffing levels to respond to the surge in claims,” including by adding an online chat feature and increasing staff from 500 employees to 2,600.) The orders show, Evermore said, that “when the government decides to clear away the roadblocks to paying benefits, it can.”
Still, none of those changes are permanent; they expire when the governor rescinds his declaration of the state of emergency. North Carolina Democrats hope the crisis will create an opportunity to make permanent changes, just as the 2008 recession did for their Republican counterparts.
If you don't believe state and local politics are relevant to your daily life this is proof otherwise. I am thankful for Governor Cooper but he can only do so much. We need to fight hard to give him a better legislature. We certainly don't need a leader who uses a phrase from Forest Gump as his campaign slogan and representatives who habitually schedule votes in the middle of the midnight hour, attempting to hide their evil machinations.
Thanks for sharing this, turbinetree. Unfortunately, it reveals that North Carolina, as bad as it is, is not alone in it's dysfunction.
❤ lmsp
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