On May 29, there were 38,000 Oregonians that had waited over a month to hear about their unemployment claim. Even though the Oregon Unemployment Department increased staff by 600%, claims had jumped to 473,000 since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

After Senator Wyden shamed Governor Kate Brown into ousting Kay Erickson as director of the Oregon Unemployment Department, the Acting Director, David Gerstenfeld, stepped in to rescue the 38,000 Oregonians waiting to hear about their unemployment claim. He said things are so grave that “we’ve started discussions with the National Guard about potentially having them help us call people about their claims.” That idea flourished into adding 100 recruits from legislative and executive branches of state government asking them to set aside time from their normal job responsibilities to make calls.

Even though the State patted itself on the back for having 154 people “volunteer” to work at Employment to reduce the backlog, these aren’t volunteers in the sense that one usually thinks of volunteers – people giving of their time outside work – instead, it’s government employees offering to not work for a period of time at their current government job, to work at Employment.

In any case, this effort has helped to reduce the backlog to 13,000 in less than two weeks. Who would have thought that state employees have that much free work time? It was magnanimous of Governor Brown to commend the “volunteers”, saying, “We do our best work when we do it together, and each of you is demonstrating the very best of who we are as public servants.” The use of state employees sends two messages to taxpayers. State government is overstaffed, and the state has no emergency plan for interaction.

The idea of sharing workforces might have come out sooner but for the lack of Governor Brown’s leadership. Her responsibility under the CEMP 3.3, is to “provide strategic guidance for state resources to prevent, mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from incidents of all types,” But, failing this mandate was complicated when she neglected to upgrade computer systems with $86 million in federal funds received in 2009. Perhaps more attention to the CEMP could have implemented a network of services across state agencies sooner as provided for in section 3.4.1.

It remains to be seen how well the state follows the CEMP recovery guidelines to bring back the economy. For example, Business Oregon’s key responsibilities to businesses is to:

• Facilitate a community-driven approach to economic recovery through the Regional Solutions program.
• Coordinate business impact and damage assessment.
• Coordinate resources for small business recovery assistance.
• Identify and help coordinate assignment of volunteer staff from economic development partners to affected organizations.
• Assist local economic development organizations or major employers needing immediate assistance for displaced workers, and assist in identification of short- and long-term employment needs.

Time will tell if the Governor needs another outside incentive to motivate her to get the economy back on track. Unemployment checks are needed to keep the economy on life support, but what we all really want is our jobs back.


--Donna Bleiler

Post Date: 2020-06-11 20:26:58

Last Update: 2020-06-11 20:27:12