Jobless Insecurity

When Chicago Plumber Eugene Quinn, 44, was laid off from his $8-$10-an-hour construction job a year ago, he thought he could count on $98-a-week unemployment compensation, to which the Illinois Bureau of Employment Security said he was entitled. But for five months the IBES failed to send him so much as a dime. Since his wife Mary Anne's earnings as a file clerk do not cover much more than food for the family of five, the Quinns' electricity and phone bills went unpaid, and both services were cut off. Finally, on Aug. 8, Quinn got checks for $1,938 of the $3,212 that the IBES owed him. Since then, there has been nothing--though Quinn makes weekly trips to the bureau to ask for his money. "All they tell me is to come back in seven to 14 days," he says.

Unfortunately, Quinn is not alone in his anguish; thousands of other jobless Illinoisans also have been kept waiting to get their benefit checks for inexcusably long periods. Just how many cannot be counted, since the IBES has been no more efficient at keeping track of how far behind it is than at handing out the money. But in August only 46.8% of Illinois jobless got their first checks within 28 days of filing a claim--the standard laid down by the U.S. Department of Labor. By contrast, 80% of the jobless in New York and Ohio, and 88% in California, got their first checks on time.

Repossessed Cars. Each day some 40 to 50 desperate people telephone "Call for Action," a national public-interest program broadcast in Chicago by radio station WIND, to complain that they are not getting unemployment-compensation checks to which they are entitled. Some tell stories of having cars repossessed or heat cut off; others plead for aid in getting emergency food. Says Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy: "It's the biggest snafu I've ever seen." He calls the IBES "the Bureau of Employment Insecurity."

A 240-page report issued by the Labor Department, and a later preliminary state audit investigation, pinned the blame for the IBES's bad performance mostly on poor management. The findings read like a horror story in bland bureaucratic prose: employees confused about their responsibilities and shifted from job to job so frequently that they never learned their jobs; a near absence of planning; managers unaware of how many staffers they could hire; offices that were unclean and unsafe; chronic shortages of supplies; employees "indulging in frequent coffee breaks, extended lunch periods and early departures." Worst of all, the state study found, the IBES was still using computer programs written twelve years ago for less complex machines than it now owns. Says John Day, an auditor for the state legislature: "The bureau is making a sophisticated computer behave like it was built in 1957."

Late last month Bureau Administrator Christopher Nugent and his Commissioner of Unemployment Insurance, Billie Paige, resigned. The IBES is now headed by Lawrence Richardson, a veteran manager, who pledges to speed up the payment of checks. The state also has announced an eight-point reform program, including the hiring of more clerks to process claims, partly in response to an order from Federal Judge Thomas R. McMillen; he presided over a case brought by Chicago's Legal Assistance Foundation, which claimed that the unemployed were being deprived of their right to prompt compensation payments. Meanwhile, Eugene Quinn is still waiting for another check.

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