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Finally, on June 22, Hill-Watkins received a direct deposit of $750 in benefits — but by then, it was already three days after her rent payment of $1,261 was due.By March, when the coronavirus began accelerating through the United States, Shawn Hill-Watkins had been working as a cashier at a Food Lion supermarket in High Point, North Carolina, for seven months, taking three buses to work and back each day.
On April 20, Hill-Watkins filed for unemployment. For two months, she didn't hear a word from the Division of Employment Security, or DES, the agency that operates North Carolina's unemployment insurance system. By June 19, when her $1,261.60 monthly rent was due, she had $30 to her name. "There is a real possibility that we will be outside tomorrow," Hill-Watkins told me a day before her rent deadline. "I wake up thinking about it. I go to sleep thinking about it.
But as real as those problems are, they ignore a more fundamental issue: Some state unemployment systems have long been designed to exclude applicants. "People are frustrated and complaining everywhere. But there are degrees of how well states are handling this based on their approach to the program," said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. "The states that are doing the worst at this have historically done a bad job of it.
The overwhelming need for benefits today, and the delays that millions of Americans like Hill-Watkins have in getting them, has set off a national awakening about the sorry state of unemployment insurance systems. That reckoning is acute in North Carolina, where jobless people will be particularly vulnerable when the $600 weekly unemployment payments from the federal CARES Act expire at the end of July.
. "I could have been anywhere else in the country," Hill-Watkins said. "And here I am in the worst place to be."that unemployment insurance is one of the most effective and cost-efficient policies to aid recovery. The premise is simple: Employers pay into the system in good times, which distributes benefits to employees laid off for economic reasons.
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