What I Wish I’d Known About Unemployment

I stole this headline word-for-word from a Medium post that was pushed into my feed recently, because it felt cheeky and I can interact with it directly when I export this story over there. Medium will likely be the topic of an upcoming post.

If you have been around for a while, you likely remember that I was abruptly laid off in October after more than 13 years at the same job. In the time since, I have been either unemployed or marginally employed, relying on the freelance work that dominates my chosen industry.

I have a lot of thoughts about the collapse of American journalism, the collapse of Hollywood, and the weird, terrifying fact that my job intersects both of those things. I’ll probably get to most of those thoughts over time, but the biggest thing I want to share with my readers is my experience dealing with unemployment insurance.

When I was laid off, I knew pop culture journalism was a saturated field that exists at the intersection of two profoundly broken industries. I knew it might be a while before I could get a salaried, full-time job. I decided to apply for unemployment insurance through the state of New York.

I am confident in saying that, if I had kept track of the time, I likely made less than minimum wage managing my benefits. I’m going to keep the actual numbers close to the vest, but just bear in mind that, for everything I describe from this point forward, I was awarded three unemployment checks.

The process was unusually fraught for me — at least I think! — but it wasn’t bad enough for me to assume it was a total outlier, especially given comments by some of the people who helped me along the way.

Here, from what I can recall, was my process:

The day after my severance period ended, I reached out to the New York State Department of Labor to apply for unemployment. I filled out the form online, but since I indicated on my form that I had received some severance, even though it was in the past, they sent me follow-up forms in the mail that I needed to fill out, and then either fax to them, or mail back.

I faxed them, which required me purchasing an online fax plan, since I wasn’t comfortable using a free one for sensitive documents.

In those documents, they asked if I had any other sources of income, and I indicated that I did: royalties from my books, which is a negligible amount of money but does technically constitute income. I had to fill out a separate form to explain all that. Fun fact: Many weeks later, after I had already accepted my job at Screen Rant, I received another piece of paper telling me that, as a small business owner, I could technically have remained unemployed and collected unemployment for 13 weeks while working on my books. Nobody at any step of the way told me this until it was too late.

During the paperwork/processing time, I was told that, while under review, I should claim my first week of unemployment — because your first week is unpaid no matter what, so you should get that out of the way as quickly as possible. I did so, and then shortly thereafter, submitted my first week’s unemployment hours.

I received a letter in the mail that said “use this card” to access my funds, or set up direct deposit. There was no card attached. I called the number on the form, and they said there was no card because I already had direct deposit set up, which made sense (after all, I had done about 110 pages of paperwork) but didn’t really make me feel better about the missing “this card.”

By now, it was early December, and my first week of paid unemployment was approved. I was told to expect a 2- to 7-day wait, but Redditors I had sought out for some answers on earlier questions said it was typically one to three days.

After 5 days, just before I applied for my second payment, I contacted the Department of Labor again. This time, when I called, the phone said that the lines were “unusually busy.” There was no option to wait on hold or even leave a message, and instead they hung up on me. This happened several more times, before I headed back to Reddit.

There, I found a post saying that when the Department of Labor was so clogged up that it was impossible to get in touch with them, you could call the office of the Governor of New York, and they would put you through to Labor. Because they had a super-secret backdoor way of doing so, you should be placed in a queue rather than just spat out.

After calling the governor, and then waiting on hold for about 40 minutes, I was able to speak to someone at Labor. They told me everything looked fine and that I shouldn’t worry. They also told me that they had no way of seeing any identifying information with regard to where they had sent my payment. All they could see was, it was direct deposited…somewhere…on the day after I had been approved.

There was something — I cannot remember what — that wasn’t totally clear, and when I related all of this to my wife, she asked me to clarify it. That meant another call to the governor, another long wait, and then a conversation with a young woman who started out our call as one of the rudest people I have ever encountered in my life. I give her a lot of credit, because she seemed to get her shit together before the end of the day, but wow, was I angry at the time.

The new representative told me that there was no good answers for the question my wife had raised. I don’t remember the specifics right now. She recommended that, rather than just waiting around for another direct deposit into the fucking Shadow Realm, I should place a hold on my second payment. That way they could approve it, and it would be disbursed in my name, but rather than making the deposit, I could access it at a later time when the issue was resolved.

This was, and I cannot emphasize this enough, probably the best piece of advice I got the whole time.

Part of her reasoning was that, since it appeared the money had been sent…somewhere else…they would have to trace the transaction. Per policy, you had to wait 25 days (I cannot remember if it was 25 business days or 25 calendar days) before you could trace a payment. At this point, I had only been waiting for the payment around 11 days, so we processed and approved my second check, and then put it on hold while we waited for the first one to either show up, or to be traced.

Another week later, I processed my third payment request. By this point, I had received no money, had spent a minimum of 5 hours on all of the various calls and paperwork, but at least had that one rep on my side. She even called me — from her own phone — on Christmas Eve to assure me that she had done everything she could, and she would call me back on the day I was eligible to run my trace.

I never heard from her again, which is why I know it was her personal number. I tried to call it back, and it went to a voicemail. It was the rep’s voice, but it was clearly a personal voicemail. I left a message and never heard back, and never wanted to call her at home and bother her again.

Around a week later, I still had not received any payment, or any sense of where the money might have gone. To err on the side of caution, I changed the destination of my direct deposit from a joint account I hold with my wife, to one with only my name on it. Just to be safe from potential computer errors. I had been told that while the Department of Labor had no way of knowing what account they were sending your money to, they could tell you the date your direct deposit information was last updated.

Around this time, I also received a letter telling me that I was expected to attend a mandatory career-counseling session at the county offices, lest they cut off my benefits. Since I had not been working in over a month by this time, and since I do not own a car, this would have meant paying for an Uber to attend. Luckily, I was offered a position at Screen Rant right at the same time, so I just called and said I did not plan to come get counseling.

I cannot stress enough that this is not the end of the story.

So, with no further unemployment eligibility, my aim was simple: get to work and, in my limited free time, figure out how to actually get my hands on the three unemployment payments that had already been "credited" to me.

Around this time, I also received a tax form, which urged me to report the first payment which I had "received."

I tried to call the Department of Labor again, and was again booted due to call volume. This time around, when I called the governor's line, it didn't work anymore. Now, that number, too, was hanging up on everyone. In order to initiate a trace on my missing money, or to release the other two payments, I needed to speak with someone at the DoL – and that was literally not possible without driving into the city to meet them. Just absolutely insane.

At this point, I had started working, but wasn't getting paid yet. I cannot emphasize enough that I'm very lucky. I'm married, and my wife has a good job with benefits. The loss of my income was certainly damaging to our finances, but it wasn't crippling in the way it would be for many Americans. This is the biggest takeaway I had from the whole experience: the system is stacked against the people with the least means, and there is absolutely no simple means by which those people can try to manage a crisis.

After another two weeks of fruitless attempts to contact the DoL or the governor's office, I finally gave up and called my state senator. That was what finally got SOMETHING happening, because someone in his office had a super-special number only available to government employees, and she became my middle-man talking to Labor. Within about 4 weeks, both of my issues were resolved and I received all three of those unemployment checks right around the same time I started getting paychecks. Again: that's great for me, but would certainly feel like salt in the wound to anyone who had desperately needed that money all along.

Frankly, the whole process was insane and exhausting. Even while re-writing the whole thing, I reached a point where I was boring and confusing myself, so this long-ass rant is shorter and less tedious than it would have felt if I had kept clear documentation every step of the way.

What's the point here? What do I wish I had known?

Frankly I wish I had known that unemployment is so completely broken in New York that it's functionally useless. I was in the absolute best-case scenario and it was still a disaster. If I needed that money to live, I would have been desperate and panicking for two months. We need to do better by vulnerable people in this state – especially now that we are staring down the barrel of a likely recession that will hit upstate New York (being, as we are, on the Canadian border) particularly hard.

Something I forgot until after publishing: On the same day I received the "come to our session or lose your benefits" letter, I also received one telling me that, since I work on my own small business as a writer, I could have claimed 13 weeks of unemployment without strings had I enrolled in a Self-Employment Assistance Program. Not only did this come too late (I had signed on with Screen Rant) but it also came four weeks after they had initially delayed my first payment because I had "undeclared income" in the form of about $15 in royalties from Amazon. So I talked to someone at Labor about my self-employment, and they never bothered to suggest that I might want to take advantage of SEAP and save myself a lot of trouble.