The state Department of Labor is beefing up its numbers of phone-bank workers and computer servers to accommodate an historic crush of jobless claims created by the coronavirus, officials said Monday.
“Just so every understands, at the peak of the 2008 [fiscal] crisis, the single largest day of claims was 13,000,” said Melissa DeRosa, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide, in a press briefing. “We had six times that two days ago.”
Millions of New Yorkers who have tried to file unemployment claims amid the contagion have faced overloaded phone lines and crashing Web sites due to the sheer volume of those seeking help.
DeRosa vowed that a smoother experience is on the way.
“We’re going to be releasing a new interface by the middle of this week,” said DeRosa, noting that the Labor Department has also partnered with Google, expanded its hours and become a seven-day-a-week operation.
“We’ve gone from four servers to 50 servers,” she said. “We just put 300 more people, in addition to the 700 people that were managing the call system.”
The agency is also experimenting with an alphabetical system by clients’ last names, under which, for example, “If you’re between ‘A’ and ‘D,’ you call on Monday … to try to manage some of the volume,” DeRosa said.
She stressed that when New Yorkers finally do get hooked up with benefits, they will be retroactive to the date of their unemployment, to make up for any lag.
“This volume is something that we’ve never experienced before,” said DeRosa. “It’s frustrating and it’s horrible and it’s unacceptable, but we just ask that people remain patient.”
