Growth industry in state? Jobless-benefits call centers

SEATTLE — Inside one of Seattle’s fastest-growing businesses, phone lines hum with 6,000 calls a week, 20 new employees a month train in a converted classroom and economic projections indicate a continued expansion and additional backlog of customers.

How unfortunate, employee Candy Wetmore thinks. How sad.

But this is the nature of the state Employment Security Department’s call center.

Wetmore understands its economic paradox better than most. She’s been taking calls from the newly unemployed for seven years now, first on the front lines and now as a supervisor.

She knows how to cut a path through a thicket of benefit regulations. She knows how to calm down a newly laid-off carpenter with a mortgage. She knows how to tell a person he or she isn’t eligible for a check while gracefully steering the person toward other, more promising possibilities. She knows how to strike a balance between personal empathy and professional distance.

She knows much of this from taking thousands of calls. And she knows something more from making one.

“When I lost my job in 1982, I had three children to support,” Wetmore said. “I was embarrassed that I was no longer working. I needed to file for unemployment for the first time. It was humbling.”

The person who handled her claim, she said, was abrupt and just wanted to get through the process as fast as possible. He didn’t seem to recognize how a person’s identity sometimes is chained to his or her job, that it gets dragged up or down along with work prospects.

Wetmore didn’t forget that when she began taking calls. Neither did Diane Demasi, 53, nor Julie Swor, 60. When they lost their jobs, neither had ever applied for unemployment. Both now find themselves on the other end of the phone line hearing stories much like their own.

“You can hear it in their voices,” said Swor, who started working at the call center six months ago. “They have a hard time saying in a straightforward way that they need unemployment. They are having an identity crisis. I know I did.”

Added Demasi: “I’ll say, ‘I’ve been there. I do know what you are going through.’”

Washington has two primary call centers, one in Spokane and one in south Seattle. The local office sits in a plain, two-story brick building near Georgetown. Administrators with the department declined to put a sign out or publish its address. It’s a call center, they explained, designed to handle only unemployment claims on the phone or the Internet.

Which, right now, is a growth industry in Washington.

In November alone, the two centers answered 104,687 calls, an increase of 40 percent from the same time last year. Since July, the department has hired 92 new agents and is interviewing to hire 32 more to start in January. By November, 87,769 people claimed regular unemployment benefits in 2008, an increase of 30,000 from 2007.

All for a check that ranges from $130 to a maximum of $541 each week.

“It’s tough to live on,” Wetmore said. “But people need something.”

So Wetmore, her phone voice a soothing confection of sugar and helium, continues to steer callers through the thicket, and her staff through the stress that comes from nonstop pleas from anxious, sometimes angry people. At times, she transfers the call from them if it advances into difficult technical or emotional territory.

Staff members don’t say “laid off.” They say “separated from work.”

They don’t cut off long stories about former jobs. They don’t respond with anger.

And when Wetmore sees one of her staff members begin to absorb too much, she might suggest that she take a walk or use the quiet room down the hall where the blinds are drawn, the light is soft and cell phones aren’t allowed.

“In there,” she said, “people can unwind and collect themselves.”

But, she allowed, it can be hard to separate entirely. Hanging on nearly every wall in the open main room, like a stock-market ticker, is a persistent digital readout of how many calls are waiting, how many need alternate languages and whether the caller’s query ranks as simple or complicated.

Wetmore glanced at the ticker.

“When you can get someone the help they need, it’s a great feeling. And we get a lot of people who thank us for the help.

“But we all have tough days, and sometimes people are pretty scared when they call us,” she said, then added: “It’s a good job. But it’s not a job for everybody.”