COURT HOUSE – The Cape May County Chamber of Commerce offered a webinar to the public May 11 to respond to the many questions people have about the unemployment process during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many county residents are familiar with the normal operations of unemployment, which is almost a structural part of a largely seasonal economy. It is not unusual for the unemployment rate to swing by 10 percentage points from January to August. For many county residents, seasonal work followed by offseason unemployment is a familiar pattern.
What is different now is a large number of people with full-time year-round jobs who find themselves out of work at a time when few are hiring. The small business community that provides many county jobs is crippled with COVID-19-forced closures. Lodging, restaurants and bars, staples of a tourist-driven economy, have also been among the hardest sectors hit by stay-at-home orders.
The result is a much-larger-than-normal group of unemployed workers, small business owners at sea for how to maintain workers on the payroll through confusing and underfunded government programs, unemployment offices that have closed, moving workers to remote environments as they grapple with overwhelming numbers of claims, unintended errors, and a multitude of questions.
The webinar was sponsored and run by the Chamber, with Sen. Michael Testa’s (R-1st) Chief of Staff Brittany O’Neill answering inquiries and offering connections through the senator’s office to help those caught in the error queue due to special circumstances or a keystroke mistake while dealing with an unforgiving computer system.
O’Neill was quick to note that most of those applying for unemployment have not encountered problems in the process and are receiving their benefits. She was using the webinar to speak to those who had circumstances that sidetracked their claim.
“An error can put people into limbo,” O’Neill said. “This is not a simple process,” she added.
O’Neill spent close to an hour responding to questions. She urged those who are unable to resolve an often unclear problem with their claim to contact the senator’s office, where she said all of the staff have been trained to help with the unemployment process.
If the staff cannot help directly, O’Neill said they can place the individual on an “error list,” which usually gets the problem resolved within two weeks.
The Chamber has made the webinar available on its YouTube Channel.
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