More than three million Americans filed for unemployment last week alone--pushing the total to more than 33 million total.
Unemployment at this scale hasn't been recorded since the Great Depression.
Here in Connecticut, the Department of Labor has received more than two years of claims in a month alone.
“So, we are in unchartered territory,” says Connecticut Department of Labor Commissioner, Kurt Westby. “The Latest US DOL report, for example, with the week ending of April 18th, a good 3 weeks ago; Vermont had an unemployment rate of 25% already, Rhode Island had one of 20% and Connecticut was 18.7%.
FOX61 is personally seeing several people having problems filing on the CT Department of Labor’s website. People's accounts are on hold, or they have reached out to the department and haven't heard back.
“We are working right now on trying to stand up something that would be not a call center, but would allow us to train the people answering those general information lines to be able to address some of the most common problems people are having,” says Deputy Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo. Whether it's a lock-out because they answered something inconsistently or it triggered because there was a change in their employment status; whether it's that they missed a week and they forgot to file, so there's an intentional hold on their system, we're in the process of building up that phone line and getting ready to provide training. I can't give you a timeline, but as soon as we can get people to do those minimal changes in the application, we'll have more access on the phone.”
RELATED: The second step for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance is now available on the DOL website
Thursday, the Department of Labor finally released this much anticipated red button, the second step for gig-workers and self-employed individuals to apply for federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance benefits.
“We're actually on target as Commissioner said and we've met our goal and we're thrilled to be able to roll this out today,” says Deputy Commissioner Bartolomeo.
477,000 people have already applied for unemployment in Connecticut. 426,000 claims have been processed.