It’s fair to say that thousands of people are still waiting for their unemployment benefits. Some of those individuals have been waiting weeks, if not more than a month to have a claim processed.
While Governor Andrew Cuomo and Secretary Melissa DeRosa tout significant improve on this front, many feel like it’s significantly under performed.
Yesterday, the age of the unemployment system was reported, which showed that parts of it date back to the 1970s.
Now, officials with the Department of Labor say that 90,000 people are still waiting to be paid because people did not ‘certify their unemployment’.
“I just need enough to survive,” said Amanda Lucas to 13WHAM. She’s a house cleaner, who’s job was deemed non-essential when Governor Andrew Cuomo put NY on PAUSE. “So what it did was, it showed me the application and it said on the application that I am eligible after filling it out.”
She was denied traditional unemployment, so she filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.
Her claim is still listed as pending, even though she received a $600 one-time payment through the system.
While state officials say that people need to ‘certify’ their non-working status, others, like Marie Locke, a hairdresser in the Rochester-area says she’s still waiting for benefits to kick in.
She applied at the start of April, and last week received a letter saying that she hadn’t certified. Locke says she’s done that a few times now, and nothing has changed about her status with the unemployment office.
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