A coronavirus outbreak at the Oregon Employment Department’s new Wilsonville office has infected 11 people since the start of November, the agency said Wednesday.
The Wilsonville office will remain open, but the department said many of the 600 employees who work there will soon do their jobs from home. The agency will adopt new safety protocols to protect those who remain.
Still, the employment department said the shift will slow all aspects of its work – further delaying the processing of new claims, adjudicating pending claims and responding to questions from unemployed Oregonians.
The outbreak “will cause real disruptions in our ability to get work at the pace we have been,” acting director David Gerstenfeld said Wednesday.
This is at the second major outbreak at the employment department. In July, the department temporarily shut its Gresham office after several workers there tested positive for COVID-19.
This time, Gerstenfeld said health authorities have not advised the department to close the office. He said current safety protocols already exceed state guidance and that the department will adopt new practices to further limit the outbreak.
Gov. Kate Brown’s coronavirus safety orders require that employers allow workers to do their jobs remotely when possible. Scores of private businesses and public agencies have shuttered their offices since March and many Oregonians are working from home.
The employment department has moved relatively slowly to remote work, though, much to the frustration of some employees. The department said technical limitations and privacy concerns have restricted the number of people who can work from home.
“It’s really disappointing that in one of the most vital agencies that Oregonians need right now, they just haven’t been able to figure out options,” said Melissa Unger, executive director of the Service Employees International Union’s local chapter, which represents many at the employment department.
While Unger credited Gerstenfeld, who took over the agency at the end of May, with showing a new openness to remote work, she said workers are frustrated that the employment department hasn’t moved faster to address staff concerns about infection risk.
“What they’ve been saying all along has kind of become reality,” Unger said.
On Wednesday, Gerstenfeld said the department has made significant progress in enabling remote work and said he hopes to shift “hundreds” of Wilsonville employees to remote work in the near future. Gerstenfeld said some employees cannot work remotely because they lack adequate internet service at home.
The Wilsonville facility, which opened in May is 100,000 square feet. Gerstenfeld said that’s enough room to give remaining, on-site workers “a huge amount of space around them.”
The outbreak is the latest in a series of setbacks for the employment department, which has paid more than $6 billion in benefits to more than 600,000 Oregonians during the pandemic. But it has often left laid-off workers waiting for months for their benefits while the department was working to overcome chronic technical issues.
Last week, the department began paying out approximately $300 million in federal “waiting week” benefits that had been delayed for eight months by the state’s obsolete computer systems. Oregon is the last state in the nation to pay the money, authorized by Congress in March for the first week workers are out of a job.
The department has now paid that money to most of the 400,000 people who had been waiting for it, but Gerstenfeld said about 52,000 haven’t been paid. The “vast majority” of those will probably be paid by the end of the year, he said, but some with more complicated cases may have to wait until the end of January.
Separately, Gerstenfeld said Wednesday that the department has adjudicated 36,000 of the 52,000 claims that were stuck in that bureaucratic process at the end of September. Many of the people who filed those claims, often with complicated work histories that require additional review, have been waiting months for payment.
At that pace, the department is on pace to clear that backlog by its end-of-year target. However, tens of thousands of other claims are pending and may also require adjudication.
-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |
The Link LonkDecember 03, 2020 at 05:50AM
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COVID-19 outbreak at employment department’s Wilsonville site will slow claims work - OregonLive
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