As Wisconsin businesses shuttered this spring to slow the spread of COVID-19, jobless filings and phone calls flooded the state Department of Workforce Development — too quickly for staffers to keep up. But DWD Secretary Caleb Frostman remained optimistic. In a May 4 email, Frostman told Unemployment Insurance Division Administrator Mark Reihl to “hang in there.” “If we can get through May, I think we will be cooking with gas with all the new people on board and call centers up and running,” Frostman wrote. Three days days later, Frostman emailed Reihl before a meeting with the state’s Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council: “We have a great story to tell of our staff working themselves to the bone on behalf of claimants and we’ve been putting the pieces in place to build that necessary infrastructure to succeed through COVID.” Do you have feedback on Milwaukee NNS's reporting? Take our survey to let us know how we're doing! Staring down nearly 400,000 unprocessed weekly claims just after Memorial Day, Frostman told a state Senate committee that his department expected to work through the backlog by early October. Now three weeks into November, a still-raging pandemic is threatening an economic recovery and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has ousted Frostman. Families are still waiting on DWD to process jobless claims filed last spring, with many missing bill payments, racking up credit card debt, facing eviction or worse. Among those waiting: 50-year-old Karrie Suhr, who worked at a public pool in Cedarburg and was scheduled to work at Milwaukee’s Summerfest when the pandemic hit. She filed her claim in June and has yet to receive benefits, leaving her with no income throughout the summer. During that limbo she learned the cancer she thought she beat had returned. “I had to borrow money from my family just to pay my own health insurance to make sure that I was covered for all these cancer treatments,” Suhr said. “So that’s been very emotional as far as just — I’ve been paying bills all my life and wanting to have good credit … then something like this happens.” Wisconsin’s unemployment safety net has buckled under a pandemic stress test. More than 1 million filed initial claims since March 15. As of Saturday, nearly 93,000 applications for regular and federal pandemic aid had yet to be processed or adjudicated, department data show. Thousands more are applying for benefits each day. More than 17,000 initial claims were filed during the first week of November alone. Ben Jedd, a DWD spokesman, noted that 7.7 million weekly claims have flowed to the department since March 15 — compared to the 7.2 million claims it handled from 2016 to 2019. “DWD has been dealing with more than four years of work in eight months,” he told TMJ4 News and Wisconsin Watch. Wisconsin is not alone in its struggle to distribute jobless aid during the pandemic, but it fares poorer than most states by at least one measure. Wisconsin paid just 42.5% of all initial claims filed between March and Aug. 15 — far below the 56% national average, according to an analysis of federal Department of Labor data by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Republicans and Democrats have both played roles in Wisconsin’s safety net failures. Party leaders are blaming each other as residents wait. “There are people who are talking about suicide. Because they’re just waiting and waiting — because the backlog is so bad,” said Victor Forberger, supervising attorney for the University of Wisconsin’s Unemployment Compensation Appeals Clinic, who has represented dozens of jobless clients during the pandemic. “Landlords are falling behind. The whole economy is going into a tailspin, because the department is falling through. And I worry about folks — and what’s going to happen if fundamental change doesn’t happen pretty soon.” Millions of Americans who have received unemployment insurance benefits during the pandemic can thank Wisconsin, where a couple who met at the University of Wisconsin Law School conceived and helped pass a 1932 Wisconsin law that laid the foundation of the country’s unemployment insurance system. The effort came as union members, employers and reformers living through the Great Depression realized that charity alone could not sustain workers through economic upheaval. But the 2020 pandemic struck after Wisconsin and other states spent recent years toughening rules for accessing unemployment benefits — in the name of reducing fraud — and failed to upgrade antiquated computer systems. Just 32% of unemployed Wisconsin workers accessed benefits in 2016, down from 50% in 2007, according to a 2017 study by the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit that advocates for low-wage workers and the unemployed.