ATLANTA – Georgia Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler asked state lawmakers Wednesday to spare an agency hit with an unprecedented wave of unemployment claims from budget cuts looming over the rest of state government.
Butler told members of a Georgia Senate budget subcommittee the labor department, which had been averaging about 20,000 unemployment claims per month, suddenly was hit with an influx of about 1 million claims when the coronavirus pandemic shut down Georgia’s economy, a number that quickly mounted to some 2 million.
Forced to cope with that soaring workload is an agency of about 1,000 employees, fewer than half as many as were on the payroll during the Great Recession a decade ago, Butler said.
“The good news is we’re getting the payments out,” he said. “We’ve found ways to be more efficient. But asking us to cut more now … I don’t think [would be] fair.”
Butler said the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program has been particularly difficult for labor department employees to handle because it provides unemployment benefits to people not ordinarily eligible for them, including the self-employed, gig workers, independent contractors, or employees of churches or other nonprofits. The agency had to train 500 to 600 employees on how to process PUA claims, he said.
“It has been a very heavy hit because we’ve never done that type of system before,” he said. “We had to build the applications from scratch.”
Despite those challenges, Georgia’s labor department has outperformed other state labor agencies by paying out about 87% of unemployment claims deemed valid totaling about $5.2 billion, Butler said.
The state Department of Revenue has collected more than $112 million in taxes from those benefits, he said.
Butler said the labor department was losing employees to other state agencies even before the coronavirus pandemic hit because off the low salaries it was forced to offer.
“We were in a bad position when [the pandemic] started,” he said. “We don’t want to get to a worse place.”
Sen. Burt Jones, vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Insurance & Labor Subcommittee, expressed sympathy for the labor department’s plight but made no promises on how the legislature will approach the agency’s budget.
“I know your people are working very hard, and they’re on the front lines,” said Jones, R-Jackson. “We appreciate your good work.”