“We believe keeping our doors open for as long as we can, where possible, is the best thing we can do to provide income for you and your families.”
M.’s budget left little margin for lost wages, so she kept coming in. She made $15 an hour, which amounted to around $1,400 a month, and with commission for in-store sales she normally earned an additional $600 — just enough to cover her $1,900 in expenses.But on Wednesday she developed a cough, so she called in sick that Thursday to go see a doctor. She hadn’t realized she had a fever, but her temperature turned out to be 100.1 degrees.
Dillard’s furloughed M. on March 27, a week into her quarantine, and she became one of the nearly 10 million people to file for unemployment in the second half of March. A technical error on her application meant she had to apply again more than a week later, when the backlog was even longer, delaying her claim during a precarious moment.
She had already lost everything once. She’d been a real estate agent in Southern California in the mid-2000s, investing in several properties, and after the 2008 recession hit, the bank foreclosed on her house and she filed for bankruptcy. She began working in retail after that, at Nordstrom and Macy’s, saving what she could and moving to South Carolina, where property was more affordable.
A few hours after a furloughed 27-year-old JCPenney sales clerk in Mississippi submitted her unemployment claim online on March 31, she received an email stating that her application couldn't be processed due to an unnamed issue, and she had to call a number to resolve it. The line was busy. She tried 11 more times that day and at least a dozen the next but couldn't crack the busy tone. She has yet to get through.
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