OKLAHOMA CITY – Jobs throughout the state disappeared by the thousands in April, driving unemployment rates into double digits in 62 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties.
The cumulative number of Oklahomans filing unemployment claims has topped 500,000, Shelley Zumwalt, interim director of the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission (OESC), said June 4. “This shows the impact of business closures and job losses due to COVID-19, as well as the oil industry crisis, all of which continue to grip the Sooner State’s economy and families,” she said.
OESC ledgers show that southwest Oklahoma counties had the steepest unemployment rates in the state in April.
Tillman County had the state’s highest unemployment rate that month: 19.7%. OESC records show that 626 workers filed for unemployment benefits that month; Henniges Automotive in Frederick has had 300 employees laid off for eight weeks.
Comanche County ranked third in the state, at 19% joblessness. Almost 9,000 workers in the county filed for unemployment benefits in April, OESC records reflect. The Goodyear tire manufacturing plant in Lawton, which according to the state Commerce Department employed approximately 2,500 workers last year, has been shut down since the third week in March but is scheduled to reopen June 8.
Elsewhere in southwest Oklahoma: Cotton County recorded an unemployment rate of 18.9% in April; Stephens County, 14.9%; Jefferson County, 14.6%; Greer County, 14.1%; Grady County, 13.8%; Caddo County, 12.5%; Kiowa County, 11.1%; Jackson County, 8.1%; and Harmon County, 5.5%.
Between March and April, the unemployment rate in the Lawton Labor Market (Comanche, Tillman and Cotton counties) soared more than sixfold: from 3% in March to 19% in April. During that one-month period the labor force declined by a little over 400 workers, to 53,278, but the number of out-of-work employees soared from 1,585 in March to 10,141 in April.
Tulsa County registered an unemployment rate of 15.5% in April, and Oklahoma County trailed only slightly at 15.4%.
For the week ending May 30, unadjusted initial unemployment claims filed in Oklahoma totaled 37,986, the OESC announced. That was almost four times higher than the previous one-week record of 9,778 initial unemployment claims filed one week in January 1991, OESC records extending back to 1987 reflect.
The U.S. Department of Labor pegged the advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending May 23 at nearly 21.5 million Americans, for a national jobless rate of 14.8%.
New OESC Director Pushes Claims Through
“We’re changing the way we’ve always done things,” Zumwalt said. “Desperate times call for innovative solutions, and we’ve assembled some exceptional people to revise our procedures to get people the benefits they so urgently need.”
Among the changes Zumwalt implemented during her first week as interim director was to push through more than 27,000 claims that had been held up for a variety of reasons in the complex unemployment approval process. The number of backlogged claims has been reduced to fewer than 5,000, she said.
“Thousands of Oklahomans who had been waiting weeks for resolution of their claims are now in paid status,” she said. “The challenge under this system continues to be that a solution to one problem tends to create another obstacle that has to be overcome.”
Many claimants did not receive funds until June 2 or 3 as the increased number of claims moved to pay status caused delays in processing debit card and direct deposit transactions, she explained.
“We are focused on the process and eliminating the red tape,” Zumwalt said. “We’ve now moved many of our Level 2 claims agents down to Level 1 in order to meet and help people on the front end.”
Additional Training For Claims Agents
The agency is also putting Level 1 claims agents through additional training to better assist claimants in clearing issues and reducing the need to escalate claims to the next level, Zumwalt said. As a result, claimants may experience longer Call Center wait times while questions are answered and issues are resolved.
The complexity of an unemployment claim has always required a period of review; the more complex the claim, the longer it takes to process. Zumwalt said she is trying to break that log jam by implementing automation to systematically resolve issues and erase inherent delays built into the decade’s old unemployment claims structure.
“We have to be results-oriented and solution-driven,” she said. “We’re quickly approaching three months since these crises began. Yes, Oklahoma is reopening and striving to get back to normal. In the meantime, we still have tens of thousands of people with no job to return to and lots of responsibilities to meet, and OESC will provide that relief.”