"It makes you just feel worthless, like you're begging someone to give you something that was entitled to be given," one woman said.
Before she was furloughed in March because of the coronavirus pandemic, Chantel Clark had worked for years as a visual merchandiser at a Macy's in Georgia so she would have the flexibility in her schedule to care for her son, who has special needs.
When she was called back to work in May, she took the opportunity. But when her 8-year-old son's special needs camp and school stopped offering in-person classes, "there were no good child care options," said Clark, 39. Without access to family leave, she had to resign to take care of her son, she said.
Because she resigned, she hadn't qualified for regular unemployment insurance. But she believed she would be eligible for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA, special unemployment compensation for people who don't ordinarily qualify for unemployment benefits, including parents unable to work because of child care needs during the pandemic.
In Georgia's system, she needed to apply for state unemployment insurance first and be denied before she could apply for PUA, which also covers gig workers and the self-employed. She applied in August, but both her initial claim and her subsequent PUA claim have been denied. She was told she didn't meet the criteria for benefits, and she is awaiting the results of an appeal.
"All the way through now, I haven't received a dime from anyone," she said.
She's far from alone. Months after the coronavirus began battering the U.S. economy, millions of jobless people still haven't received unemployment benefits, the nonpartisan Century Foundation think tank estimated. Others have endured extensive delays.
In some cases, states are too overwhelmed to tackle their immense backlogs of applications, said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the foundation. In other instances, aggressive systems to root out fraud are slowing getting much-needed aid in people's hands.
"That's been very difficult, very frustrating for people that have, some of them, waited many, many weeks or even months for their benefits," he said. "It's a big issue."
To make ends meet, Clark and her husband used the money they had been saving to purchase a home. They can no longer afford speech therapy or applied behavioral therapy for her son. They sold their second car. And Clark's husband is working double shifts, picking up extra work whenever he can, "just to keep our family afloat," she said.
Clark said that her husband has diabetes and that the family is "making miracles every single month just to afford his prescription medication, because it's so expensive."
"You're just trying to hold on day by day, and it makes it so much more difficult when you have no communication with anyone," she said. "It drains you so mentally and emotionally, and it makes you just feel worthless, like you're begging someone to give you something that was entitled to be given."
Unemployment claims remain well above pre-pandemic levels, when weekly applications typically numbered around 225,000. Claims reached a high of 7 million in March, according to the Labor Department, before they fell in the summer. The number of people applying for first-time unemployment claims has hovered around 1 million in recent months; 847,000 claims were filed in the week that ended Jan. 23, the department reported. Nearly 16 million people now get some type of unemployment assistance.
State agencies say they have hired new employees, brought back retired ones and worked seven days a week to try to keep up with the staggering number of claims, while also trying to combat fraud.
Unemployment agencies in Georgia, California, Oregon and Kentucky didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Millions of people are still waiting to be approved or rejected for benefits, Stettner said, citing the foundation's data.
The foundation also looked at claims levels Dec. 26 and estimated how much would have been paid out if benefits hadn't been interrupted by the delay in enacting the stimulus bill at the end of December. The group found that the program should have been paying out $11.5 billion per week in January. Instead, it said, actual payouts reported by the Treasury Department for all unemployment benefits totaled $28.7 billion as of late January, about $17.3 billion less than the $46.1 billion in benefits "that would have gone out if everyone would have received the promised aid on time."
Stettner said that because state systems have been so overwhelmed, "anyone who had any kind of complication in their application was having a lot of problems and severe delays in the process."
That has been the case for Nicole, 34, an actor and teaching artist in California. Nicole, who asked that her last name not be used out of fear of future employment issues, filed for state unemployment insurance after her outlets for employment shut down in March. She applied for unemployment assistance and went months without a response.
"It's just all the waiting and all of the calling that you have to do that takes time away from actually looking for work or actually bettering your life," she said.
A few months after Nicole applied, California's unemployment office told her that the issue was that she had made money in New York and New Jersey before she moved to California in September 2019.
"So, not only was the California unemployment office overwhelmed, but they had to call the New York unemployment office to confirm my income and they're overwhelmed, and they also have to call New Jersey to verify my income," she said. "And I just kept being like: 'I have all my tax forms. I've had them all here for you. I faxed them to you. I've emailed them to you.'
"I just don't understand this very silly thing of verifying my income when I have federal documents proving what I made," she said.
Nicole said she had to go on food stamps for the first time, accept boxes of donated food and borrow money from her parents.
"If I didn't have that, I would have been homeless," she said. "I would have been on someone's couch for sure."
She received her benefits with back pay in August, five months after she applied — but because the state has yet to verify her New Jersey income, her benefits were still short of what they should have been, she said.
Any relief she felt was brief. In September, Nicole's benefits stopped without explanation, and she said she was back to calling the state's unemployment office to no avail until the assistance started again this month.
"It made me feel very small and very helpless," she said. "There was shame, and there still is shame."
As part of his proposed $1.9 trillion relief package, President Joe Biden has called for additional payments, including direct payments of $1,400 per person and a $400-a-week federal unemployment program.
In an executive order, the Biden administration established a coordination system across federal agencies to help people figure out what benefits they qualify for. The White House cited the difficulty laid-off or furloughed service workers have had getting timely access to benefits.
Mary Proffitt, 64, found herself applying for unemployment benefits for the first time after she was laid off from her restaurant job in Kentucky in March. Initially, the state's system just kept crashing, she said. She was eventually able to get through at the end of March, and she collected a few weeks of benefits, but after she had to recertify in May, she suddenly found herself in a callback queue. She waited 18 weeks before she got back payments and was able to pay her bills.
"I'd been living off of what little bit of savings I had prior to this, because you just literally can't go 18 weeks without a dime," said Proffitt, whose teenage son has special needs and whose immunocompromised father she helps support.
"The most stressful thing is having to juggle priorities and not having any income at all," she said. "Is it the light bill? I have to have cable, because we have to have Wi-Fi for school."
