SEYMOUR (NBC26) — A medical condition kept Candi Robbins home from work on March 17th, the date she filed her employment claim. 200 days later, she's still waiting.
"I thought to myself, 'well my application was received in march, so should be on top of the file right?'" said Robbins.
After weeks went by and no check came, she returned to her job. She was hardly back for a few days when she found she needed to leave again, permanently.
"Returning to a workplace that had no social distancing and no cleaning supplies, it wasn't a safe work environment for myself," said Robbins. "I wasn't planning on leaving my job. I transferred my whole family here for this job."
Robbins was unemployed for twelve weeks, before finally finding a job. She's still trying to catch up on bills and payments from those weeks when she didn't have an income, she said.
“I’ve been gainfully employed since I was 13," she said. "It’s pretty frustrating. I have a family of five, and it’s not that I’m not working. I know there’s people that can’t find work and aren’t working. I am working, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not behind and don’t need those funds.”
Robbins found through Facebook that she's not the only one waiting on a claim from months ago.
"Posts, hourly: of questions, about things on their portal, how to best get through the lines, just looking for any kind of information," she said. "There's thousands of people in all of these groups. Seems like some of us that are waiting for the normal unemployment insurance and the PUA are stuck in that limbo. We’ve been passed over now, and people are receiving there LWA payments for the end of August and September."
Jim Golembeski, Executive Director of Bay Area Workforce Development, said this surprised him.
"Why somebody is still pending from March, I don't know," he said.
While he understands Robbins' frustration, he said, adjudicators are working hard to help people like her.
"These are highly skilled people," said Golembeski. "Believe me, they are working as hard as they possibly can."
Often times, the DWD needs additional information, he said, and it just takes a lot of time to sort some claims out.
"Unemployment is an extremely complicated and detailed program," said Golembeski. "It's set up primarily to prevent fraud. This is a long-standing mess that's been created over a 30 year period."
After countless emails and phone calls, Robbins has done everything she can, and feels like her case is pretty cut and dry.
"I worked, I took off, I went back to work," she said. "That's all there was."
