OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma Employment Security Commission has approximately 1,200 claims representatives staffing its call center and online chat feature, to handle the record number of claims for unemployment benefits.
According to OESC Chief of Staff Cyndi Phillips, unadjusted initial claim filings during the week ending April 11 numbered 48,977, adding to the previous record-setting adjusted weekly high of 60,534. Unemployment claims in Oklahoma have surpassed 200,000 since mid-March, Ms. Phillips said Thursday.
Most recently:
• Best Buy, which has more than a dozen stores in Oklahoma, announced last Wednesday it would furlough or lay off approximately 51,000 employees across the nation, affecting nearly all of its part-time and some of its full-time workers.
• Baker Hughes laid off 234 employees from its Oklahoma City manufacturing center, state officials announced last Wednesday.
• Michelin furloughed 1,500 employees from its Ardmore tire production plant last week.
• Goodyear, which shut down operations at its tire manufacturing plant in Lawton the third weekend in March, announced earlier this month its temporary suspension would extend to April 20 “or until further notice.”
• Chesapeake Energy laid off 200 employees in Oklahoma, and SandRidge Energy announced plans to lay off 26 more employees.
• Signal Peak Silica, a hydraulic fracturing sand miner, shut down its field operation in northwest Oklahoma, sending 87 workers into the unemployment lines.
OESC IMPROVES OPERATIONS
The OESC has beefed up its procedures, staff, call center and website to assist Oklahomans applying for unemployment benefits and to process claims. The agency is awaiting authority from the U.S. Department of Labor to implement the next phase of Pandemic Unemployment Relief to gig workers, independent contractors and other self-employed individuals. “We remain optimistic these funds will be available” soon, Ms. Phillips said Thursday.
The OESC had more than 940 active Tier 1 agents working call center lines last Wednesday. “Tier 1’s are people who can answer basic questions,” Ms. Phillips said. For more complex claims questions, the OESC has Tier 2 specialists. More than two dozen were brought aboard recently and, through training sessions conducted daily and on weekends, the agency expects to have 200 by April 20.
Tier 2 claims service agents handle the more complex issues of an individual’s unemployment claim to better facilitate resolution, explain eligibility requirements, request specific documentation, place outgoing calls to provide claimant assistance, and address employer concerns who protest a claim for qualifying decisions to terminate employment, Ms. Phillips said.
“Training of Tier 2 claims service agents typically takes six weeks,” OESC Executive Director Robin Roberson said in a statement. “We’ve reduced that training down to a few hours to increase our ability to respond to the tremendous influx of wage claims related to COVID-19 and the energy crisis.”
During the first three hours of operation on April 15, more than 3,100 calls had been answered out of 3,200 calls received. The average wait time to speak to a claim specialist dropped to 31 seconds, on average, Ms. Phillips said. “The longest wait time was less than 36 minutes, compared to more than 7 hours one week ago.” The number of people who gave up waiting for a claim specialist has dropped from more than 86% earlier this month to 1.04% percent, she said.
ADDITIONAL BENEFITS
The agency is assisting claimants with the additional 13 weeks of expanded benefits for individuals whose regular unemployment benefits have expired or are set to expire. Oklahoma is among the 26 states that are paying the additional $600 a weekly benefit amount authorized and funded by the CARES Act. These additional benefit payments will continue through July 25.
Nationwide, about 22 million individuals have filed for jobless benefits in the past month – easily the worst stretch of U.S. job losses on record, according to the Associated Press. Roughly one in seven workers have lost their jobs, the news agency reported.
That translates into an unemployment rate of 14%, and some economists predict the jobless rate could climb to 15% by the end of this month – a new post-World War II high. Layoffs which first struck the service industries, such as hotels, restaurants, retail stores and entertainment, have expanded into white-collar professional occupations like software programmers, legal assistants and salespeople. The construction industry, too, is suffering. And the oil/gas exploration and production industry has been pummeled by a price slump stemming from a global oil glut.