Oregon Employment Department to cut phone hours to catch up on claims
By Joe Hathaway on Thursday, May 16th, 2024 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
SALEM – The Oregon Employment Department is making some big changes to its phone hours starting in June.
The ODE announced it will slash its phone hours until staff can catch up on backlogged unemployment claims.
Beginning on Tuesday, June 4, the agency’s phone hours will be reduced to be open from 9:00am to 4:00pm. Starting the day before on June 3, phones will be closed entirely on Mondays so staff can focus on processing claims and troubleshooting issues. Currently, phone lines at the OED are open from 8:00am to 5:00pm on weekdays.
While the Monday closures will be temporary, the agency says the 9-4 phone hours will be permanent.
“Because our top priority is to significantly reduce the number of people waiting for their claims to be resolved, we need to give our employees more time to focus on resolving claims,” said agency Director David Gerstenfeld.
The agency claims the issue comes from a lack of funding for the department and that the problem with staff shortages to blame for the backlog predates the Frances Online relaunch that happened in early March.
The OED said the temporary change will continue until claims issues that are causing claims to take longer than six weeks to be either approved or denied are reduced by at least 80%. In a release, Gerstenfeld said those issues are now roughly 13,500 but noted that some claims have multiple issues, therefore the number of issues does not correspond to the number of claims taking more than six weeks.
He said that there are roughly 28,000 claims with issues and roughly 7,800 applicants waiting longer than six weeks to find out if their claims will be approved or denied.
The changes will impact those calling about unemployment insurance, Paid Leave Oregon, as well as contributions and recovery.
