Notification from the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA)
In late March 2020, the Greater Boston Legal Services reached out to me. I had volunteered there as a translator last year during a bout of unemployment, and now they were asking if I could help Cantonese speakers apply for unemployment insurance (UI). Having used the Massachusetts unemployment system twice and whereby encountered deep levels of frustration, I was uniquely qualified to help. This task could only be more in my wheelhouse if it required generating a chart and a pun, attaching them to a disc and flinging it all across a river.
www.mass.gov/dua houses the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance program. Hopefully many of you readers are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of unemployment assistance in America (although I suspect that is less and less true). The principle asserts that taxpayers who have paid into state coffers and find themselves suddenly unemployed can assuage their situations by receiving weekly payments in proportion to their tax contribution, until they find a new job. It is limited to state residents and state earned income, and not eligible to people who have voluntarily left their job or been fired for cause.
My frustrations with the system encompass both its design intentions and its execution. A pall of antagonism against “government handout takers” hovers over every new page of inane questions — I sense that the designers would rather ten worthy UI seekers be denied rather than one cheat take advantage of the system. When combined with a user interface design from the early 2000s without any sophisticated “user research”, and you’re left with a system that has nearly reduced me to tears on multiple occasions. I’ve needed to show up in person to the offices twice and still lost out on 2 weeks of legitimate claims — and I speak English and use the internet well! Imagine how hard this is to navigate for older immigrants, who empirically comprise the bulk of claims in Boston?
So you sign in with your social security and click submit — but of course you have to first check that camouflaged box on top that says you agree to a bunch of government legalese. Then the application process consists of approximately 10000 questions — no but legitimately there are 30 pages. The first question asks, “Did you work part-time last week?” If you didn’t work at all last week, you are supposed to answer…. yes. What they mean is “were you eligible for unemployment last week?” The system assumes that you are applying on your first full week of unemployment, not taking in mind that quite a lot goes on when you unexpectedly lose your job, and a filing with the government might slip a few weeks. So if three weeks go by since your layoff date, can you apply for all three weeks? Yes you are eligible for full benefits, but the system only lets you apply for this week and the past week. If you want to get that third week, you have to call the state or visit in person — neither of which are options at the moment.
Another logical breach occurs with the following 1–2 punch of questions:
1) How would you like to receive your correspondence? Electronic or US Mail
2) Is English your primary language? Yes or No
Corresponding via US Mail makes me shudder, but if you choose Electronic and not English, the system tells you that Electronic correspondence is not available in other languages — although it actually is. You LITERALLY cannot proceed unless you change your response to indicate English is your primary language. A representative government is a government that forces you to lie.
The system requires choosing most applicable job title amongst a list written in the late 90s (I waffled between Research Statistician and Computer Informatics) for no real discernible reason. Further questions include:
- Are you considered working on-call for this employer?
- Are you a member of a corporation or a shareholder in this company?
- Are you customarily laid off?
- Are you required by a court order or other government agency to pay child support?
Lastly, you are required to look for work 3 days/week and fill in a Work Search Activity Log. This includes interviewing, attending training workshops, networking, going to the career fair. Is it an efficient way to show you are looking for work? No. Does a legitimate job search require spending 3 different days each week doing these specific tasks? Some weeks almost certainly not. Does anyone actually ever check? No.
If you remain on unemployment for 8 weeks, you have to attend a Job Center workshop, to learn to find work, otherwise you stop claiming benefits. Does it matter if you went 7 weeks without a job then landed one with a start date in 2 weeks? Still need to attend. Does the state have any resources even remotely helpful to a data scientist? Rhetorical. I took the bus into a training center in Roxbury only to find out the session information was inaccurate, and had to shuttle to a session later that day in downtown Boston where I sat bored for 2 hours.
But the worst part are the numerous critical, time-sensitive correspondences between you and the DUA. Do they email you? Kinda. Does the email say anything? Never. It merely links to the department website, where you then need to log in just to read the message. The message isn’t even a message, it downloads a PDF, which is always by default blocked by browsers. The platform is not accessible outside the US, and is frequently down for maintenance.
God forbid you forget your password. The password reset system is legitimately bugged, as I walked clients through the process and entered the exact right verification codes and the exact right security question answers only to get denied. If you need that password, the key to everything including even reading correspondence, you have to call the state or visit in person — neither of which are options at the moment.
I lost two weeks of claims because I didn’t read and respond to a notification within the assigned 10 days. The appeal I filed was denied with no explanation provided.
The people I help are all from Guangdong province, China. They range from 40–70 years old, worked as restaurant waitress, home care aide or masseuses, with educations ranging from 5th grade to finished high school. All of them are literate in Chinese, except for the one who is Viet Hoa, and speak standard Cantonese, except for the one whose Taishanese I understand maybe 60%. Many of them worked at restaurants I’ve frequented, meaning I’ve likely interacted with them before, but never gave much thought to their lives outside the restaurant. For my first “client”, I tried to walk her through the website, directing her to the login link. As I struggled to figure out how to say “login tab” in Chinese, she told me she wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. “Um, do you see that blue part underneath the light yellow part, above the white part, above the picture with the woman?” “No.” The client finally sent me a picture of what she was seeing and I realized she was accessing on her mobile. I wouldn’t even have conceived of that option for myself, but having now worked with 8 clients, none of them own a computer. Most of my clients have not figured out how to open the PDF messages on their phone.
When I first saw the estimated weekly payout value for my client, I thought we’d made a mistake. Only $120? I looked at her wages, did some quick math, and sat stunned wondering how anyone could survive in Boston on $20K a year. None of my clients make more than $35K of taxable income — here’s a reminder that the tips-based economy really hurts in this situation. All of my clients live in the metro area and I can usually hear children in the background. Every single person I talk to needs this money, and none of them are realistically capable of applying for it on their own.
I know that building an unemployment claims system is hard. There are so many different types of workers, so many bad actors to account for, so many permutations of unemployment seekers and job discharges. And I did get paid a sizable chunk that covered my rent and expenses, twice, bringing me much relief in times of stress. To be further complimentary, Massachusetts has waived the required waiting week period and work search activity requirements in this COVID-19 period. They’ve poured resources into keeping this overwhelmed system afloat, but ultimately they’re patching a broken system.
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I learned that the DUA online platform was created in the early 2000s, when state governments were given federal dollars to invest in digital infrastructure. Invariably the decision makers didn’t know how to make the best technical decisions, and the lowest bidding contractor they hired used some front-end and back-end technologies that quickly became obsolete. This is similar to how New Jersey has ended up needing COBOL programmers in this time of crisis. As time passed, only that contractor could maintain the system, no one could really add to it. I’m sure no product designer at the time was thinking about the experience of Haitian or Chinese immigrants. Mobile internet didn’t even exist yet. Federal money has not been earmarked for state digital infrastructure in the same way since, and that poor decision in the early 2000s haunts us to today.
It’s not fair to blame the programmers for their lack of multi-decade foresight, or the program manager who approved these fateful choices. What I encountered with the DUA was the product of a systematic defanging of US government depriving it of crucial expertise. A trend pushed by Reagan1 but picked up by all subsequent administrations has seen more and more work outsourced to private contractors. What has suffered has not been so much the quality of the product — I’m sympathetic to the argument that the private sector may do specialized work more efficiently — but rather the gradual erosion of expertise within government. As skilled government workers left for higher paying equivalent roles in the private sector, an “unvirtuous” cycle was created with less skilled employees training less and less skilled employees. The crisis of the federal talent pool was identified as early as 2000 in this Brookings article which stated:
Government must provide challenging work and the opportunity for growth. It is irresponsible to recruit talented graduates only to squander their commitment in a dead-end job with no chance to make a difference.
With all due respect to my friends who work in government, I see a lot of truth in this. When combined with the overly restrictive government GS pay bands, which limit all federal employees to below the salary of a second year Facebook developer, government is rarely seen as a desirable job for America’s best and brightest. As a result you have program flops like the Job Center I was forced to visit, which I was delighted to find panned in another article:
For example, the Department of Labor’s One-Stop Job Centers were intended to be an all-in-one resource for employment seekers, providing job seekers with career counseling and connections to both job opportunities and education and training programs. Unfortunately, they have failed to live up to their promise. … What’s needed, according to the Brookings research, are performance measures that encourage cost-effective One-Stop programming that leads to higher wages, more tax revenue, and less taxpayer spending on unemployment insurance.2
It doesn’t need to be like this. Civil service is an honor in many countries, where the best and brightest do hope to end up. Singapore is the most obvious example, where a variety of factors such as the Singapore Government Scholarship (free international tuition in return for years of service), higher wages and greater overall trust in authority has created a country where government actually works, and people want to work in government.
With regard to tech in American government, the salary difference might pose too high a barrier without substantial reform. But can we get creative? Can we not create a secondment system for burned out Silicon Valley workers? A three month semi-sabbatical lending your node.js or pandas expertise to federal programs? Can the FANG firms not scrape together a fellowship to instill some mid-career product managers in a 1 year position redesigning a decrepit state program? Surely there are better uses of societal capital than throwing $200,000 at a senior software engineer to improve the backend data ingestion in adtech.
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I’m glad the Greater Boston Legal Services in conjunction with the Chinese Progressive Association, Viet Aid and others have created a network providing service to underserved immigrants that is able to scale up in times like these. It’s been quite stressful fielding texts and calls in Chinese, often with frustrating issues that I’m unable to resolve, between taking meetings at my real job, while ambulance sirens inexorably blare outside. However, I’m grateful for my experiences and ability to help out those in need, while I keep my job. But if coronavirus teaches us anything, government is important. We need a way to collectively help each other out when disasters strike. We need a deep rethink of how government operates and equally important, who operates government.
2 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-us-department-of-talent/404428/
