While our OCSEA Ohio Dept. of Job and Family Service customer service representatives (CSRs) in the unemployment division continue to work in overdrive helping Ohio’s unemployed with precision and care, the cracks in the state’s overlooked and overwhelmed jobs program are really showing. The culprits? Understaffing and contractor abuse, says OCSEA leaders in ODJFS.
A bill introduced in the Ohio House, House Bill 614, creates a council on unemployment that could look into these issues plaguing the agency, says the union. ODJFS union leadership are currently reviewing the bill to see how ODJFS bargaining unit employees could be a part of the solution.
Besides the well-publicized outdated IT system and recent data breeches, cuts in staffing over the last decade have decimated Ohio’s unemployment compensation division, particularly in claims in-take and adjudication. In 10 years, ODJFS has sliced more than CSRs from the rolls through attrition and reorganization. This has left the agency struggling when Ohioans need them the most. In 2010, ODJFS employed 976 CSRs. Today, that number is 343, with a skeleton crew of fewer than 270 responsible for unemployment claims.
Even with record unemployment prior to the current health care crisis, employees in the UC division struggled to keep up and were worn thin on the claims-processing side. With Ohio hitting nearly 1 million unemployed workers in April, the situation is dire. That number is nearly triple what it was in March of this year and quadruple what it was during the month of April a year ago. Staff average 500,000 customer calls a day.
Instead of investing in the current workforce and putting in place a system that will allow Ohio to more easily “scale up” in the case of emergencies, Ohio is now spending millions of dollars in contractor fees to process unemployment claims, including to at least one firm overseas.
The answer to this isn’t more contractors; it’s investing in more full-time permanent staff.
Getting up to speed on unemployment processes is a slow and complex endeavor, especially when contract employees with no history or only a general knowledge of the processes step in. Besides, the recent data breech by Deloitte, who holds a multi-million-dollar contract with ODJFS, is just one example of the risks of handing over government functions to private companies who may not have the best interests of the public in mind or the requisite security protocols in place. Deloitte has been very active in Ohio politics for years and has given a considerable amount of money to those calling the shots in Ohio, including $5,000 to the Governor and Lt. Governor's PAC just as recently as 2019. And it continues to pay off for them despite their cost to taxpayers.
The impact of chronic underfunding of ODJFS is plain for everyone to see. That’s why we are calling for a real investment in ODJFS of several hundred more customer service representatives and an intense focus on ramping up infrastructure.
A year ago, we may not have been able to predict that we'd be in this situation today; however, OCSEA leaders in ODJFS have, for two decades, denounced continual staff cuts and contractor abuse, with particular emphasis on the need to be properly prepared in times of crisis. Those decries, sadly, have fallen on deaf ears.