Jul. 1–A preliminary agreement has been reached between the Georgia Department of Labor and attorneys who filed a class action suit aimed at pushing the department to speed up its handling of jobless claims and questions from claimants, federal court documents show.
The deal, set to be finalized Sept. 1, pending court approval, calls for the DOL to improve its communications systems and eliminate remaining backlogs by the end of the year, according to attorneys for the Southern Poverty Law Center and Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore. The law groups filed the suit on behalf of people waiting for claims or appeals to be resolved after the department was overwhelmed during the pandemic.
“COVID-19 broke the Georgia unemployment system,” said Jason Carter, a partner at Bondurant, Mixson. “These new systems should provide timely information to claimants, reduce the number of chokepoints, and help ensure that the system won’t break again.”
The agreement does not mention costs. The improvements to DOL systems are already underway and will be funded from the department’s ongoing budget, Carter said.
In a press release, SPLC and the Bondurant firm said when the suit was originally filed in 2021, “hundreds of thousands of people were waiting for their unemployment claims to be processed or an appeal to be heard.”