By PETER HANCOCK
Capitol News Illinois
phancock@capitolnewsillinois.com

SPRINGFIELD — While new unemployment claims remained historically high in the final week of May, the surge of new claims since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be starting to slow as a number of businesses begin to reopen after two months of forced closure.

The U.S. Department of Labor reported that 46,522 workers in Illinois filed first-time claims during the week that ended Saturday, May 30.  While that number would be considered shockingly high in normal times, it was actually 20 percent lower than the week before when 58,263 new claims were filed.

The number of workers receiving continuing unemployment benefits was also down about 5.5 percent from the previous week, to 720,580.

From March 1 through May 30, the Illinois Department of Employment security has processed more than 1.36 million unemployment claims, nearly 11.5 times the number of claims processed over the same period last year.

The agency also processed 98,757 applications for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA, a federally-funded program for workers who lost their jobs for specific COVID-19-related reasons and do not qualify for regular unemployment. IDES also processed 42,119 applications for Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, or PEUC, another federally-funded program that extends benefits to people who have already exhausted their regular state unemployment benefits.

Gov. JB Pritzker ordered the closure of many nonessential businesses on March 20. In the days before that, he also ordered all K-12 schools to close and restricted restaurants to delivery, drive-thru or curbside pick-up service.

Those restrictions remained in place until Friday, May 29, when Illinois entered Phase 3 of Pritzker’s reopening plan. Since then, retail stores, barber shops and hair salons have been allowed to open, with capacity limits, while bars and restaurants have been allowed to open for outdoor dining.

While the stay-at-home order was in place, however, the state of Illinois suffered a historic drop in revenue, according to the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, or CoGFA.

The biggest hit came in the form of retail sales taxes, which were down $182 million, or 23.1 percent.

CoGFA’s latest monthly report also detailed the extent of the economic slowdown. Based on the number of routing requests made to Apple Maps, driving was down more than 60 percent in the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago during the third week of March compared to mid-January. It remained down about 40-50 percent in April for both Illinois and the nation.

Those numbers steadily improved throughout May and are now back to about the same levels as before the pandemic, CoGFA said.

Also, restaurant reservations on the website OpenTable.com were down 100 percent in Illinois during April and May. And even in states that reopened sooner than Illinois, reservations were still down 60-70 percent.

CoGFA additionally cited data showing a large drop in hotel occupancy as well as new housing starts.

“Both the U.S. and the State of Illinois have a difficult path to walk as concerns between public health and economic health must be weighed,” the report stated. “The key to rebounding from this economic slow-down is to provide an environment where both customers and employees feel safe, while ‘reopening’ fast enough so that those employees who have been furloughed have a job to come back to. The longer it takes to ramp up economic activity, the more likely businesses will close down for good.”

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SPRINGFIELD – The unemployment rate in Illinois reached a staggering 16.4 percent in April, the highest rate recorded since the modern system of tracking joblessness began in 1976, the Illinois Department of Employment Security said Thursday.

The previous record of 13.9 percent was set in February 1983, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The rate in April was 12.2 percentage points higher than March, which was revised downward to 4.2 percent, reflecting a revised estimate of the number of people in the labor force that month.

That news came just a few months after the state set a record low unemployment rate of 3.4 percent in November, reflecting the speed with which the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a virtual shutdown of most of the state and national economies.

The numbers reflect an overall loss of 762,200 nonfarm jobs since March, the largest single-month decline in state history, and a decline of 822,800 jobs since April 2019.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on our economy, as has been the case in states across the nation,” Deputy Gov. Dan Hynes said in a statement. “As we move to safely reopen much of our economy, we are focused on ensuring working families and small businesses have the resources they need to recover, and we urge the federal government to step up and provide additional relief.”

IDES said that because of the high unemployment rate, extended state benefits are now available to those who exhaust their 26 weeks of regular state unemployment and the additional 13 weeks of federal Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, or PEUC.

IDPH said that since March 1, it has processed more than 1.2 million claims for regular unemployment. In addition, it has processed 74,515 applications for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or PUA, since that program launched May 11, and another 36,367 applications for the PEUC program. Both of those programs are 100 percent federally funded.

During his daily COVID-19 media briefing, however, Gov. JB Pritzker said even those additional programs might not be enough to help unemployed workers weather the storm.

“I’ll be honest with you, I see the $600 extra that people got and are getting in unemployment benefits, even that added on top of the existing unemployment benefits doesn’t seem to be enough,” he said. “And when you think about the amount of time that it looks like, that the economists, not me, the economists are saying that it might take us to get back to normal, I’m concerned that the typical number of weeks that are allowed may not be enough.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Illinois leisure and hospitality industry was hit the hardest by the pandemic, shedding more than 295,000 jobs during the month, or nearly half of the sector’s workforce. The trade, transportation and utilities sector lost just fewer than 100,000 jobs, or about 8 percent since March. Professional and business services shrank by 93,800 jobs, or 11.3 percent.

If there was any good news in Thursday’s report, it was that the economic impact of the pandemic and shutdown orders showed signs of leveling off.

The U.S. Department of Labor said Thursday there were 72,816 new claims for unemployment filed in Illinois during the week ending May 16 – a staggeringly high number, but an increase of just 145 from the week before.

In addition, for the week ending May 9, there were 733,466 workers in Illinois receiving continuing unemployment benefits, a decrease of 22,446 from the week before.

Pritzker said Wednesday that all four regions of the state are on track to enter the next phase of his reopening plan on May 29. That will enable most offices and retail establishments to reopen, using social distancing restrictions. Also, bars and restaurants will be allowed to open for outdoor seating using social distancing practices.

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By PETER HANCOCK
Capitol News Illinois
phancock@capitolnewsillinois.com

SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois Department of Employment Security has confirmed that a new online portal that processes claims for federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance briefly allowed public access to applicants’ personal information including Social Security numbers.

The PUA system, which went online May 11, is a federal program that provides unemployment benefits to gig workers and other independent contractors who are not normally covered by regular unemployment insurance.

The data breach was first made public Saturday when state Rep. Terri Bryant, a Murphysboro Republican, said in a news release that she had been alerted to the issue by a constituent the previous day.

“Through a series of just two clicks, this constituent stumbled upon the personal information of thousands of unemployment applicants on the IDES website,” Bryant said. “This came up in a spreadsheet with thousands of names containing sensitive information. The information she was able to access included the name, address, Social Security number, and unemployment claimant ID number of thousands of people.”

In a statement Monday, IDES said its analysis found that one PUA claimant had “inadvertently” accessed personal data for a limited number of claimants.

“That claimant notified the department of the issue and within an hour, it was corrected to prevent any future unauthorized access,” the agency said.

The state of Illinois contracted with the international business services company Deloitte to build and maintain the web-based portal. IDES said it is now working with the company to run a “full-scale investigation” into the problem while conducting additional tests to prevent any future data breaches. It also said it is working to notify affected individuals and will release the analysis of its investigation once it’s completed.

Asked about the issue during his daily COVID-19 briefing Monday in Chicago, Gov. JB Pritzker said similar issues have occurred elsewhere in the public and private sectors but that the state and Deloitte were working to resolve the problem.

“This, as you know, has happened in large corporations and other aspects of other governments around the United States, and we don’t like it happening here,” Pritzker said. “Deloitte, which built that system, and obviously the glitch that was in there is something that was a result of the work that was done to build it, but they are offering credit reporting for all of those who are affected by it to make sure that they can monitor their credit in case there’s any problem they may undergo.”

Meanwhile, IDES still encourages people covered by the program to continue filing for benefits through the PUA portal. The agency said more than 50,000 claims have been processed through the system so far. The program provides up to 39 weeks’ worth of benefits for qualifying workers who have COVID-19-related claims.

People with questions or who need help with unemployment benefits are encouraged to visit IDES.Illinois.gov.

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By JERRY NOWICKI
Capitol News Illinois
jnowicki@capitolnewsillinois.com

SPRINGFIELD — The U.S. saw nearly 3 million more unemployment claims the week ending May 9, including another 72,993 in Illinois, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The 2.98 million claims nationwide in the week pushed the jobless claims in the first two months of the novel coronavirus pandemic to more than 36 million. The unprecedented number of claims made for a national unemployment rate of 15.7 percent the week ending May 2.

In Illinois, the number of new claims on the week was 1,483 fewer than the week prior. The number of new claims each week has gone down since a peak of 201,041 during the week of April 4. The Illinois Department of Employment Security said in a news release it has now processed 1,076,461 claims for regular unemployment benefits from March 1 through May 9.

Continued claims reached 756,441 in the state last week, which was the final period before contractors and self-employed persons were able to file for special federal pandemic unemployment assistance in Illinois.

“While the number of initial claims for regular benefits has plateaued in the last two weeks, IDES will experience an increase in overall claims processed when the federal pandemic unemployment assistance claims data becomes available Thursday, May 21,” according to the department’s news release.

Gov. JB Pritzker said this week more than 50,000 applications had been filed through the state’s new pandemic unemployment assistance system since Monday.

“It is working reasonably well,” he said of the new portal in his Tuesday daily briefing, calling the new system “a more robust system than the existing one for regular unemployment.”

Pritzker said the existing system was “built on a 10-year-old platform not expecting to take the kind of size of applications that have come in for regular unemployment.”

Reports of long wait times and an inability to reach employment offices over the phone persist amid the unprecedented inflow of new claims.

“We have many thousands of calls that come in each day, thousands get answered and responded to. And people get processed over the phone as well,” Pritzker said in his Wednesday briefing.

The state has expanded call center capacity and Pritzker said online applications are the best way to get an application through the system.

“I realize that it is difficult when you can’t file, if there’s some problem with your filing online, and it requires perhaps an arbitration or some other intervention that it does have a personal discussion with somebody,” Pritzker said Wednesday. “We’re working very hard; we’ve just spun up this outside call center to add on top of the internal IDES capability. And we’re getting to them as fast as possible again with an unprecedented number of filings, it is difficult.”

IDES said in the news release it has processed 33,729 Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation claims, which provide up to 13 weeks of federally-funded benefits to individuals who have exhausted regular state unemployment benefits.

At his Thursday briefing, Pritzker announced a new “Get Hired Illinois” website that is aimed at connecting job hunters with employers looking for new employees. That site, at Illinois.gov/gethired, also has information on virtual job fairs and training opportunities.

He said from June through December, in a partnership with online learning platform Coursera, the state will offer unemployed workers “free, unlimited access to 3,800 online courses and 400 specializations offered by over 160 of the best universities in the world.”

Pritzker said the level of access normally costs $400 a year, but is free to those who are unemployed in Illinois.

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