How North Carolina Transformed Itself Into the Worst State to Be Unemployed
Across the country, unemployment systems are collapsing under an unprecedented number of claims. But some state systems, like North Carolina’s, have long made it harder to receive unemployment benefits.
By Ava Kofman
|
June 30, 2020 2:27 p.m.
By March, when the coronavirus began accelerating through the United States, Shawn Hill-Watkins had been working as a cashier at a Food Lion supermarket in High Point, North Carolina, for seven months, taking three buses to work and back each day. She couldn’t afford the groceries she was ringing up for customers, but she had always been outgoing and knew how to keep the mood upbeat. Older regulars at the market sought out her line. They knew her by the colorful silk flowers she had sewn for herself, which she would wear behind her ear.
Hill-Watkins is 50, with six children and nine grandchildren. For years she’s lived around Virginia and in Philadelphia, making ends meet as a hairdresser, a seamstress and a house cleaner. Last June she came to North Carolina with her youngest son, Devan, after one of her daughters, who was in an abusive relationship, called her for help. Her daughter later left, but Hill-Watkins decided to remain. She had gotten the grocery job and eventually moved into a room with a kitchenette in an extended stay hotel just off Interstate 40 in Greensboro. Devan, who is 15, had made friends on a local football team. Hill-Watkins had been running around trying to help her children for two decades, she said, “and I felt like I couldn’t run with them anymore.”
Despite the rising risk of COVID-19, Hill-Watkins and her fellow cashiers were not wearing masks in early spring. It wasn’t long before she came down with something that seemed to be the virus. She was too sick to work — sleeping for hours and coughing up phlegm — but not sick enough to go to the hospital for testing. By the time she got back on her feet, a week and a half later, the store had reduced her hours to zero, where they’ve stayed ever since. (Food Lion said it doesn’t comment on “any specific associate matters” and that it “continues to follow guidance” from all health authorities.)
On April 20, Hill-Watkins filed for unemployment. For two months, she didn’t hear a word from the Division of Employment Security, or DES, the agency that operates North Carolina’s unemployment insurance system. By June 19, when her $1,261.60 monthly rent was due, she had $30 to her name. “There is a real possibility that we will be outside tomorrow,” Hill-Watkins told me a day before her rent deadline. “I wake up thinking about it. I go to sleep thinking about it.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/how-north-carolina-transformed-itself-into-the-worst-state-to-be-unemployed
-snip-
And just to the west sits #Moscow Mitch from Kentucky sitting on a bill called the Hero's Act..............who's worse................
= new reply since forum marked as read
Over the year the libertarian BS over the last years has made this country what it is, they have taken out tax dollars and gave it to those that should be giving it to us , because without us, they would absolutely nothing, not even a pot to pee in..........and for #Moscow Mitch to make $18500..a mouth doing absolutely nothing says that he is not defending the country or its people...........his federalist society is a criminal organization, they hate the preamble to the Constitution/........................
It's worse now.
The difference between a thing being clicky or not is inconsistent. I can wave my mouse pointer around the screen and watch its image change as it passes over obvious and not so obvious links, but it doesn't change as it passes over some buttons within the page.
Sorry about traipsing OT. 
