A safety net in name only

Who could have predicted anybody would ever actually need this?  Anybody who counts, obviously. I mean there are scores of people we're used to treating like garbage every day. Not you.  But, wait, what if that was suddenly you? What then?

The stimulus bill is providing $600 per week through July 31 to both salaried and independent workers who are jobless — an amount that dwarfs the maximum state payment of $247 per week. But they have to complete an application successfully for unemployment benefits to the Louisiana Workforce Commission to be eligible for the federal aid.

Ava Dejoie, the commission’s secretary, acknowledged the ongoing problems faced by applicants, saying the flood of jobless people was beyond anyone’s expectations.

“No one was prepared for this,” Dejoie said in an interview. “The systems were not built for this amount of capacity because this was the unthinkable.”

"No one was prepared" for the day when a lot of unemployed people would need sign up for unemployment.  Also we never considered that benefits should actually be sufficient sustain anyone. Who would have thought the social safety net would actually have to keep people safe? As it is we only have capacity to do that until August.  Assuming the website is working by then.

Yes, the COVID crisis is a large event but, really, this should never happen. Still, many Louisianians have been struggling with insufficient benefits dispensed through a clunky website for years without anyone taking enough notice to care. We'd love to say that's going to change after this. But we know it probably won't.  These systems exist specifically because they keep peoples' lives precarious and workers compliant. Reversing that is going to be a heavy political lift.