KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Millions more Americans have filed for unemployment this week totaling more than 30 million since the start of the pandemic.
That includes another 52,403 people who applied for unemployment benefits in Missouri this week plus 28,054 new unemployment claims in Kansas.
"Certainly, those are not numbers anyone likes to see, but I don’t think they are unexpected,” Keely Schneider, executive director for Workforce Partnership, said. "Perhaps things are starting to level off a little bit with the new unemployment claim."
Schneider helps people who are unemployed find jobs Johnson, Wyandotte, and Leavenworth counties in Kansas.
She said approximately 51,000 people have applied for unemployment in those three counties alone since COVID-19 shut down the Kansas City economy. Her hope is once businesses reopen, the amount of claims will shrink as businesses "at least over time start to hire back or bring back into work the same workers they had already.”
Meanwhile, some people who filed for unemployment, like Michael King, find themselves stuck in limbo.
King works in construction and was laid off in October, but now he can’t re-file for unemployment because it’s still within his benefits year.
"Our benefits ran out," he said. " We are basically in no man's land, so we’re all just sitting trying to figure out how to pay our bills.”
The Kansas Department of Labor said, with respect to King's case and others like it, it is working to handle with these kind of cases with an outdated computer system.
"The timeline for those individuals will be mid- to late May," Kansas Labor Secretary Delia Garcia said. "We're working with our IT (department) to make sure the timeline moves faster than that."