AUSTIN (1080 KRLD) - Unemployment numbers annihilating previous records, the Texas Workforce Commission has been very busy fielding unemployment claims.
Three-quarters of a million Texans have filed unemployment claims in the last three weeks alone.
To handle the extreme load, the office is extending its hours.
"Our call centers will now be answering calls from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m," says Gamez. "And starting Monday, they're going to be available seven days a week."
TWC has also boosted manpower at those call centers.
"This week brought on additional two third party vendor call centers to help with most calls, and we're working on a third as well that may go online next week," Gamez says. "We've moved around 450 people from other departments into Unemployment Insurance Services. And we emergency hired around 100 staff to help our call centers as well. And we're continuing to hire."
The commission's web servers have also been overwhelmed with the volume of online unemployment claims, so it has quadrupled them.
"When we first started taking applications for unemployment insurance when COVID-19 started, we were working on five servers," says Gamez. "We multiplied that to 10. And as of last night at 2 a.m., we actually added another 10 servers to handle the volume. So we're at 20 servers."
Despite the added hours and manpower at the call centers and the additional web servers to handle the online traffic, people may still have trouble getting through initially.
Gamez says delays in submitting your unemployment application will not affect the effective date of benefits.
"We're looking at the date that you stopped working, the day your hours are reduced (or) the day you might have been laid off, rather than the day that you are applying or get through," Gamez says.
