some parts that hit hard to me
TULSA — John Jolley never thought he’d be sleeping in his car awaiting unemployment benefits. But there he was, the owner of a once-successful advertising agency, taking a sweaty nap in a Subaru wagon in a convention center parking lot at 1:45 a.m. on a Wednesday.
The pandemic sent his business into a free fall, and now Jolley wanted to be first in line for an unemployment claims event beginning in five hours. He barely dozed, afraid that if he fell into a deep sleep, he would miss the early-morning handout of tickets for appointments with state agents.
There would be just 400 tickets handed out for that day’s event. When those ran out, there would be 400 more for appointments the following day.
Even though the unemployment rate dropped to 6.6 percent in June, the backlog has created unprecedented delays. Oklahoma had approved 235,000 of about 590,000 filed claims by June 21 — a total $2.4 billion payout, far more than in previous years. About 6,000 state claims are pending.
The 58-year-old single father arrived in the parking lot of the River Spirit Expo center in Tulsa around 9 p.m. on a sultry night with a heat index approaching 100 degrees. The landmark 75-foot statue of the Golden Driller — a nod to Tulsa’s oil and gas hub — towered over one side of the dark parking lot, his face painted over with a surgical mask.
Jolley’s unemployment claim was approved in March but had been stalled, a problem that hadn’t been fixed after nine phone calls and hours on hold with the OESC.
Others were not so lucky. The numbers quickly ran out, and people were told they had to return the following day. Eventually, staffers referred people to the three new events added for the coming week because of the demand.
Ashley Love, 31, a former customer advocate for Enterprise Rent-A-Car, had risen at 4 a.m. to take her 2-year-old daughter to her mother’s home before heading to the convention center, only to be told she had to come back the next day. She was laid off in March, when the pandemic nearly obliterated the travel industry. Her benefits inexplicably stopped four weeks ago, the agency website saying only she was on a “verification hold.”
Love was getting down to the last she has, having run through $4,000 in savings. Even before her benefits froze, she was getting only about $137 a week, plus $600 a week from the federal government’s pandemic emergency assistance program, due to expire around the end of the month. Her regular monthly bills — rent, car payment, insurance — are $2,091.
and on, and on, and on
felt like i was rereading Grapes of Wrath
