To avoid virus, she left her job. Unemployment help never came. Now she’s back at work.
When Sharon Slone, 75-years-old and immunocompromised, learned in late March that Kentucky broadened its unemployment benefit eligibility because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she applied, knowing that her job as a gas station attendant put her health at risk.
Slone works up to 30 hours a week behind the register at a Marathon station in Richmond. She likes how interactive the job is and the chance it gives her to talk even fleetingly to the dozens of people that approach her counter each day. Because of its proximity to Eastern Kentucky University, many of the customers are college-age. She likes that. It reminds her, she said this week on her porch, of her career as a custodian in a school district in Seattle, Washington.
But once Kentucky confirmed the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, which preys on people like Slone, she understood the social aspects of her job also pose the greatest threat to her health. Not only hers, but the health of her daughter, April Payne, with whom she lives.
Slone has Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), diabetes and is immune-deficient. She spends at least $150 each month on medication, not counting the copays for regular doctor’s visits. Slone also smokes, which she knows isn’t healthy. She’s tried to quit before, but it’s just about the only thing keeping her stress at bay these days.
Payne, who’s 52, also has diabetes and was diagnosed a few years ago with sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disease that acutely affects her ability to breathe. Both Slone and Payne are considered at risk, meaning their underlying health issues, compounded by Slone’s age, make them especially vulnerable to a bad COVID-19 infection.
“Our house is just real sensitive,” Payne said this week. “She’s got her medical conditions, plus her age, and then we’re both diabetic, we both have asthma. We’re that one household where it’s the slightest thing and we’re done.”
A few weeks after the state confirmed its first few hundred cases, businesses not deemed essential by the state were shut down to try and limit spread. To accommodate for massive job loss, the state expanded who could apply for unemployment benefits to virtually anyone whose income had been impacted by the pandemic. The expansion also applied to anyone who “left their job for good cause,” including “reasonable risk of exposure.” Slone saw herself as fitting in this category, so she decided to draw on that option when cases began to crop up in Madison County, where she lives and works.
After clearing it with her boss, she left her job in late March and applied for unemployment the first week of April. On April 13, the Labor Cabinet mailed her confirmation, saying she had “sufficient base period wages to establish a claim for unemployment insurance benefits,” according to the letter, which she shared with the Herald-Leader. She should expect to receive $70 a week.
But now, 16 weeks later, that has yet to happen. The benefits she was promised have yet to arrive. The extent of her communication with the state is a weekly automated message that arrives like clockwork each Friday night, assuring her that her claim is still in the queue.
But Slone can’t take that assurance to the bank. In waiting on the state, she depleted the savings she spent years accruing; has had to pick and choose which medication to pay for because she can’t afford all of it, and to cut even more substantial corners, she stopped paying the full portion on her life and car insurance. Slone and her daughter, to spread out their now shared income, have cut down from three meals a day to two; they skip lunch.
With nothing left to cut, unable to pay her bills and afford even her reduced medication, Slone returned to work in early June, just weeks before Kentucky’s infection rate began to spike. Her compromise was to work just enough to earn the roughly $70 a week she’s supposed to get from the state.
“It’s still not safe for me, but I had no choice,” she said flatly. “I had to give up and go back to work.”
‘How hard can it be?’
Aside from the nearly 730 Kentuckians who’ve died from the virus and the more than 29,000 who’ve contracted it, the tens of thousands of people unable to collect timely unemployment benefits is the biggest casualty of the pandemic.
Beshear and other state officials have not shied away from reiterating just how ill prepared the Office of Unemployment Insurance was, both in staff and system capacity. The system became so overwhelmed in March by people filing claims, it started crashing frequently. Just a dozen people manned unemployment office phone lines pre-pandemic. In early April, around the time Slone filed her claim, the Labor Cabinet hired an additional 1,200 staff to help process claims.
Unable to fully resolve the staggering backlog, the state decided to use $7.6 million in CARES Act money to bring in a few hundred staff from Ernst & Young to help speed along that process in July. This week, Beshear said the contract, due to expire July 31, will be extended for another five weeks. In total, the state has agreed to pay Ernst & Young upwards of $12 million.
In the five months since Kentucky diagnosed its first positive case, residents have filed 1,080,421 initial claims. Close to $3.5 billion has been paid out, and more than 90 percent of those claims have been processed, according to the Labor Cabinet. But that means close to 68,000 people are still waiting to either learn they don’t qualify, or receive months-old back pay. That includes 6,625 claims filed by people whose last day of work was in March and 22,090 from April.
Slone is one of them, and she’s tried every avenue to get it resolved. Of her claim, a spokesperson for the Labor Cabinet Thursday afternoon said the department is “in the process of resolving the claim,” adding that “no one in state government will be satisfied until all Kentuckians have received the unemployment benefits for which they qualify.”
About a week after Slone started working again, scores of other people with unresolved claims descended on the State Capitol in Frankfort for help. Some drove across the state to stand in line for eight hours. Slone thought about going, “But I did not have the gas money to drive to Frankfort and back,” she said.
Steeling herself against the possibility that her benefits just might not come at this point, Slone would be satisfied with any communication from the state, even just to tell her she doesn’t qualify.
“How hard can it be?” she said.
Meanwhile, new infections in Madison County have begun to surge, now totaling close to 500. At the gas station, Slone tries to be as safe as she can. That includes enforcing the mask mandate for customers, which she’s had to do more than once. One of her regular customers, she said, refused to wear one recently, “So I said, ‘hit the door.’”
In hindsight, Slone said leaving work and putting confidence in a system that hasn’t supported her wasn’t worth the financial bind she’s in now. “I know I’m not near as bad off as some of these people out there,” she said. “But I often wish I had just kept working and if I got [the virus], oh well, I got it.”
This story was originally published July 31, 2020 at 4:37 PM.
