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Training Underway in Remote Ready Hawaiʻi Pilot Program
The Remote Ready Hawaiʻi Pilot Program is starting small with nearly 100 residents training as customer service or business development representatives. Kaʻala Souza is with the Workforce Development Council, which partnered with the state and private sector to offer the program.
“So we’re working with a small cohort over the next six months or so to get them trained over three or four weeks. They get paid during that program, and then they’re hired,” says Souza, “So they’re going to be working immediately.”
Promising news for the more than 58,000 Hawaiʻi residents who are still out of work says Scott Murakami, head of the Economic Innovation Team at the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. But there’s a bigger picture as well.
(ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
April 21, 2021
5:12 PM ET
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The pandemic has wrought economic turmoil throughout the United States, but it has been especially tough on the state of Hawaii given its reliance on tourism.
The dramatic pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions have worsened income inequality, homelessness and will likely worsen government dependence in the long term due to economic suffering among Hawaii residents, according to a Monday report from The American Conservative.
Tourism accounted for almost a quarter of the state’s economy pre-pandemic, Hawaii Public Radio reported. But coronavirus has largely put tourism and travel on hold for the past year, wrecking Hawaii’s economy. Despite lowering (but still rather high) levels of unemployment, experts think that Hawaii’s economic woes could linger or worsen, especially in terms of homelessness.
February 2020, the Unemployment Insurance Division of the
Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) received an average of 13,000 UI claims each week. By the middle of March,
Texas saw well over 100,000 weekly claims. During one week in April, the number exceeded 400,000.
Given this enormous shift,
Texas, which has a legacy UI system, had to make several tech-related changes, said TWC CIO
Heather Hall. The TWC website was moved to the cloud. Web servers were doubled in March and again in April. Mainframe capacity had to be increased by 200 percent. The UI department expanded its call center capacity by deploying interactive voice response with help from Google and Genesys and doubling its call centers from four to eight through local partnerships.
Are States’ Unemployment Systems Recovering from COVID-19? The number of unemployed Americans skyrocketed due to COVID-19 and the surge hit state unemployment systems hard. We look at systems in Hawaii, Rhode Island, Indiana and Texas. Jed Pressgrove, Government Technology | March 12, 2021 | Analysis
During the first quarter of 2020, the U.S. Department of Labor told an unforgettable story with its unemployment insurance claim numbers. In the week that ended on March 21, UI claims across the country amounted to about 3 million, dwarfing the previous week’s count of roughly 250,000 claims nationwide. “This marks the highest level of seasonally adjusted initial claims in the history of the seasonally adjusted series,” a DOL press release robotically pointed out.