On the job: Just another day at the unemployment office

NORFOLK

Nine people had already queued up in the unseasonable April chill 20 minutes before opening time. Not bad for a Monday morning.

The line grew to nearly 20 by the time the doors were unlocked, at 8:30. They pressed into the Virginia Employment Commission office, letting loose their questions, their frustrations, their confusion, some timid, others demanding.

"If I have to, I'll go to my congressman," grumbled a man contesting the rejection of his unemployment claim.

Behind the front desk in the lobby, Cindy Leadingham calmly fielded their volleys.

She gently turned back someone having problems with an unemployment claim in Tennessee. Wrong state. To those wishing to apply for Virginia benefits, Leadingham offered two options: Sign up online at the office or try it at home. Most then left. One stayed, saying: "I'd be better off doing it here; my computer acts crazy."

Her response: "You can go on upstairs and have a seat. Someone will call you from the waiting area."

It sounded like phrasing from a receptionist, but Leadingham is not one. The office's 20 work-force services representatives swap turns at the front line to better direct clients, equipped with their knowledge of unemployment intricacies and a computer that can show each person's case history.

The unemployment office - a counseling center for some, a tangle of bureaucracy for others - has been inundated with visitors since the economy nosedived. Hampton Roads recorded a 7.2 percent jobless rate in February, the highest in more than a quarter-century.

This morning, 50 people checked in with Leadingham in the first 45 minutes.

No one raised much of a ruckus.

A shining testament, perhaps, to Virginia gentility - or the managers' wisdom in providing a security guard for the lobby since January.

"A few people were getting obstreperous," said Otis Jackson, a 38-year agency veteran who runs the Norfolk office. "It got like 'Animal House' down there."

Leadingham's sedate dress - blue blouse, gray sweater, red skirt - matched her demeanor. Nothing jostled her even tone.

A woman with a teenage girl in tow complained that she'd tried to file a claim after her work hours had been reduced, but the computer had rejected her.

Leadingham explained the problem: The system won't let someone file for benefits if she worked that day. Wait for the next day you're not working.

"It's weird that I have to drive all the way down here to find that out," the woman harrumphed.

"It's a little quirky with dates like that," Leadingham apologized. "I understand."

Mondays are usually among the busiest at the VEC office: People who got laid off the previous Friday filing claims, others fulfilling vows to start their job hunt at the beginning of the week. The crowd this Monday, though, numbered 281 - short of the usual 350 to 400.

"A couple of months ago, you had to be here by 7 o'clock in order to get in the building when it opened," said Thaddeus Stenson, 65, of Suffolk, who was looking for a job as a piping systems designer. "Then you had to wait a couple of hours before you saw somebody."

Stenson, like most of the day's patrons, had been directed to the second floor to wait to speak one-on-one with a representative. He entered Berkis DeLeon's cramped cubicle at midmorning to extend his benefits.

DeLeon filed his claim and then encouraged Stenson, unemployed since December, to sign up for Virginia Workforce Connection, a VEC Web tool. She showed him how to use it to write a resume or cover letter.

In the afternoon, DeLeon saw Sherlita LeGrand, 42, of Virginia Beach. LeGrand had lost her job as an electronics technician with Lillian Vernon Corp. in Virginia Beach earlier in the month, but her unemployment claim had been "blocked."

"I'm glad you came in," DeLeon said in a honeyed voice after diagnosing the problem. "It wouldn't have released the issue otherwise." The claim, she said, would be processed within two business days.

Conversation shifted to the job hunt. DeLeon complimented her client for conducting an "active search."

"I'm not a house mom," LeGrand confessed. "I need to be out and away from the house."

LeGrand showed DeLeon an ad for a postal job that required a fee. "I've always been interested in working for the post office," she said.

DeLeon warned: "Every time I see a fee involved, I don't like it." She couldn't find the job on the agency's list of openings and suggested LeGrand call one of the main post offices.

DeLeon inspected LeGrand's personalized VEC computer account and found she had set her job search for Virginia Beach. "Do you want to expand that to Hampton Roads?" Definitely.

"She knows what she's doing," LeGrand said afterward, "and she was willing to help."

Other visitors also praised the customer service. "My personal experience has been pretty good," said Matthew Kight, 51, a mechanical engineer in Norfolk. "I haven't run into any bureaucracy."

Michael Pooler said he had.

Pooler, 24, of Norfolk lost his job a month before as a packager for Stihl Inc. in Virginia Beach. He said he had to wait for an hour to get a new PIN for his computer account.

"It could be faster," he said, "but as far as the service goes, it does help you out."

People call it "the unemployment office," but Hosey Burgess, the work-force services supervisor, said the name masks an array of services to find employment. The second floor has a bank of 24 computers for people to look for jobs.

That Monday, the office attracted a dozen older teens and young adults for a session about the federal Job Corps program. It also hosts weekly classes for the GED certificate and visits by AARP representatives.

The VEC has occupied the two-story dark-brick building on Virginia Beach Boulevard, a couple of blocks west of Military Highway, since the early 1970s. It has an institutional feel, with dirty tan walls and water-stained ceiling tiles.

The fortunes of the office, and the duties of its employees, have oscillated as much as the lives of some job-seekers who visit it.

In 2005, the state agency closed its Virginia Beach office, on Viking Drive, shifting 12 workers, and many more clients, to the Norfolk office. In March 2008, the agency suffered a round of layoffs, including six in Norfolk.

But the office has since added workers, thanks in part to an increase in federal funding triggered by higher jobless rates. Its 52-person staff is larger than it was before the layoffs. However, Jackson expects a few to be borrowed for a VEC "express" office to open in Portsmouth next month.

In the past, a visitor had to see two workers to file an unemployment claim and get help in a job search. Those duties were integrated agencywide a decade ago. In January, the Norfolk office attempted another streamlining, opening an express counter on the first floor for simpler requests.

Late morning, two men and one woman waited for more than 20 minutes for help in the express area. The men swapped stories about the ages of their Social Security cards. The woman oversaw two boys alternately playing and fighting.

One of the men, Charley Rode, 52, an unemployed construction worker from Chesapeake, later said it took him half an hour to get a tax form listing his jobless benefits. He wasn't complaining: "It's better than it was 10 years ago, when you had to send a pile of paperwork through the mail."

The 20 work-force services representatives, including DeLeon and Leadingham, make up the largest component of the Norfolk staff. They come from varied backgrounds - recruiting, personnel, nonprofit agencies.

After 10-1/2 years at the agency, DeLeon, 50, said she's making about $35,000 a year. That doesn't please her, but "I pretty much love what I do."

So does Leadingham: "I've had jobs that paid more, but it's the fact that I can go in there and put in a meaningful eight hours and help people."

She asks those she's helped to contact her when they land a job, and she gets a couple of those messages every week.

"It makes me feel that maybe I've empowered that person a little bit," said Leadingham, who is in her 30s. "I try to build them up when they're with me so that when they go out, they feel they can do something."

The Norfolk staff also includes 10 veterans representatives, who focus exclusively on veterans and outreach to employers to find them work; eight hearing officers, who mediate disputes between employers and workers, and five tax representatives. Their job: to ensure businesses pay their fair share of payroll taxes. That money subsidizes unemployment benefits.

Jodi Rossman, 50, a tax representative for almost 25 years and self-described "numbers person," calls it "the best job in the agency."

She loves to educate businesses step by step. Recalcitrant employers, she said, face such penalties as tax liens or garnishment of bank accounts.

Occasionally Rossman delivers happy news, as when she told a "good-sized employer" that it was unnecessarily paying taxes on a group of employees. "We're not just out there to get them," she said.

The hearing officers are among the few employees at the office who work behind closed doors. The Virginian-Pilot could not speak with any of them. Burgess said that, unlike most of the other employees, they report to the Richmond office, which needed to grant approval for an interview. Joyce Fogg, an agency spokeswoman in Richmond, did not return two phone calls seeking approval.

By 3 o'clock, the crowd awaiting Leadingham's help had dwindled to a handful.

The last visitor of the day, Gabriel Fitchett, came in a shade before 4:30, bathed in frustration.

Fitchett, a student at ECPI College of Technology, lost his job at Circuit City in March. He'd filed for unemployment but had yet to receive a check.

Fitchett, 21, of Virginia Beach said he'd had no luck calling the agency: "I've been put on hold for 45 minutes and hung up on three times."

Jackson and Burgess attributed many phone complaints to the VEC's toll-free number, which they said feeds into two call centers outside the area. The Norfolk office, they said, added voice mail to its main number this year.

Leadingham checked Fitchett's record and found the sticking point: He'd listed himself as a student. The agency needed to know when he took courses and how that affected the number of hours he could work. She asked him to return the next day with a class schedule.

Even Fitchett had a faint word of praise for the office.

"It's better in person, 'cause they can't hang up on you," he said before he left.

Philip Walzer, (757) 222-3864, phil.walzer@pilotonline.com