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Georgia Dept. of Labor: Lawsuit is pushing for changes that have already been made, preliminary settlement reached

The SPLC called for the department to improve its communications systems and eliminate any backlog. However, the labor department said this has already been done.

ATLANTA — The Georgia Department of Labor is firing back after The Southern Poverty Law Center released a proposed settlement between the two parties.

The class-action lawsuit filed by the SPLC is asking the department to re-evaluate the way it was managing jobless claims made by Georgians.

During the height of the pandemic, 11Alive reported that thousands of claims were filed but the Department of Labor could not keep up with the volume of calls. Thursday, the preliminary agreement was approved by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. In the agreement, the SPLC called for the department to improve its communications systems and eliminate any backlog it may have.

However, the Dept. of Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said these demands were already put into practice and the claims process has been caught up for more than a year.

"For the attorneys on the other side to say they did all these miraculous things for these different people is extremely disingenuous and frankly untrue," Bulter said.

He added that the expectations of the department were not realistic, considering what it was faced with.

"So the expectation that during a pandemic when you're staffed to take care a few thousand people a month to all of sudden to start experiencing millions of people over the span of two weeks, with no time to prepare and to have the expectation that everything was going to be perfect and there's not going to be any type of delays is extremely unrealistic," he said. 

In a news release, attorneys for SPLC said there is still more work to be done.

 “While GDOL claims there is no current backlog in making payments for unemployment benefits, we know there are still hundreds of thousands of people waiting for their appeals to be heard, with many having no idea when their appeals will occur,” said Jamie Rush, a senior staff attorney for the SPLC Economic Justice Project. “The changes agreed to in this settlement should allow people to get their claims and appeals processed quicker while keeping them informed about what is going on.” 

The two sides are still in ongoing discussions. The deal is set to be finalized on Sept. 1, pending court approval.

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