State employees wasted hours on Instagram as unemployment backlog grew: [View all]
PORTLAND, Ore. — As tens of thousands of people in Oregon waited for unemployment benefits, state workers paid to process their claims wasted hours scrolling through Instagram and Facebook at a temporary call center in Wilsonville.
“A lot of us were playing on our phones. I was playing on my phone throughout the whole day,” said Desi Thonis, 32, an Oregon Employment Department worker. “It was so stupid because we could have been working.”
Thonis said for roughly two weeks, managers limited workers to only a small handful of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) applications after the program launched in Oregon on April 28.
“We all worked on them so fast that there weren’t any left,” said Thonis. “After 9:30 a.m. there was nothing left for us to work on.”
The Oregon Employment Department director David Gerstenfeld said, if true, he would be troubled to hear that state employees were on social media for hours.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/oregon-employment-department-employees-wasted-time-on-instagram-as-pua-unemployment-backlog-grew/283-9ff7a8a0-fe16-4b17-9fc0-681f39034d76
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