On a short block of Waverly Avenue across the street from my apartment complex are nine businesses: bodega, nail salon, hair salon, dry cleaner, laundromat, shoe repair shop, mid-sized grocery store, pizzeria, another dry cleaner. The pizzeria burned down 14 months ago, taking the second dry cleaner with it in what at the time constituted significant neighborhood news. (I’ll have to walk eight blocks for a slice!) Six weeks back I saw signs of life in the dry cleaning store, thought it might soon re-open.
Then: CoronaWorld. Waverly Market does a brisk business. The eight others: shuttered.
New York State has deemed laundromats essential businesses, so I was surprised when mine shut down.
“For a couple of weeks,” the owner said.
“I hope no one’s sick,” I said.
He waved his hands. The gesture could have meant anything.
The place is a purely drop-off operation: $1.10 a pound to get sheets, towels, shirts, pants, socks, underwear washed, dried, tightly folded, sealed in plastic, stuffed back into the bag in which you brought them the previous day. They deliver, but the walk is short; I often combine it with a trip to the market or the library around the corner. It’s the best $20 I spend every week.
Labor is segregated by gender: six to eight women at the machines doing the washing, drying, folding; three or four men at the front dealing with customers, working the registers, weighing, stacking, retrieving laundry bags. At least two other men pop in and out, making deliveries. The women uniformly fail to catch my eye; the men are uniformly friendly. After three-and-a-half years we know each other, greet on the street, at the market. If the boss is around — maybe half the time; I think he owns other outlets — the atmosphere is all business. If he’s out, the mood ranges from relaxed to jovial.
Every worker is Chinese save one Filipino man, probably early 30s; he cleans, fixes machines, retrieves laundry bags when others are busy. He takes public transit from Queens, I think Ridgewood; when I worked in Queens we’d commiserate about the commute. He loves arena rock circa my high-school era (well before he was born); he often greets me by singing the chorus of whatever song he has in his head: Wheel In The Sky, Cold As Ice, Carry On Wayward Son, More Than A Feeling, Dance The Night Away, Heat Of The Moment. He often asks if I ever saw any of those bands; when I told him at my first concert Foreigner opened for The Eagles (along with Atlanta Rhythm Section, Heart, the Steve Miller Band: Day On The Green, Oakland Coliseum, May 1977), he looked at me with something like reverence. That I disdain most of the bands he loves is a fact I’ve worked hard to keep to myself.
I think of him, along with the 40-odd workers of the block’s closed businesses, when I read about the record-setting weekly unemployment figures: 5.2 million new claims this week, 22 million in the last four weeks. (Previous record for new claims, in the Reagan recession of October ’82: 695,000. People across the country are lining up at food banks.) None of these workers gets severance pay, furloughs, sick leave. They all work paycheck to paycheck, can’t have accrued any savings. Similarly, the businesses’ margins must be wafer-thin; how long can any survive without income? Will their landlords defer rent? Will government aid reach the owners? Their staffs?
Last week was the 26th and final week of my New York state unemployment benefit. (I have a full-time teaching job for the fall that I trust will still exist; I got hired for a Census Bureau temp job that was frozen in CoronaWorld.) It was also the first week of the federal CARES act, the $2.2 trillion law designed to defibrillate the economy. Congress allocated $260 billion for states to help the jobless, with two elements crucial for me: extending payments for 13 weeks to those who’ve exhausted benefits; and adding $600 to the weekly benefit (more than doubling my payout). I filed in the usual online way (a process that takes two minutes); two days later, the state labor office put the regular amount plus $600 in my checking account: lovely.
Then the office generated emails saying my benefits had expired, no further help would be extended, I could contact this number for help finding work. The department’s website provided ambivalent info: those already approved for unemployment insurance need do nothing to collect 13 weeks of additional benefits; and those who’ve exhausted benefits after July 2019 should file a new claim. Which category was mine?
Almost 1 million people have filed new claims since Gov. Cuomo ordered New York to shut down; last week alone the number was 395,000. To describe the system as “overwhelmed” is to understate. Reading the website helps little; contacting a human is impossible. I try the phone system 14 ways on four different days, totaling probably 10 hours. I call as soon as the office opens; each time, my phone shows, I hit redial more than 20 times to get through. Once on the line every automated avenue leads to messages like: “Thank you for calling New York State’s Department of Labor. You have exceeded your maximum number of attempts. Good-bye.”
On Sunday I try the phone and website simultaneously; through a path I can’t recreate I’m somehow able to register online. I fill out basic info; an automated screen pops up to tell me I have a valid claim on file, an agent will call within 72 hours to complete my application. Having heard nothing by Wednesday I start re-dialing: no luck. The website returns me to the automated screen. If I don’t file a claim by Saturday I assume I’ll get no benefits for the week.
Thursday I go to the website and, with little hope, hit a new button: Check payment history. Somehow this links me to a screen through which I submit my typical claim. Still no one has called me. For the moment I assume I’m in the automated, “do nothing and collect 13 weeks” category. I’ll believe it when I see my bank balance bump.
Through it all, I consider myself lucky.
In the 24 hours ending 8 p.m. Thursday, 4,591 people died of Covid-19, Johns Hopkins reports (topping the previous high of 2,569, set Wednesday). Of those, 2,141 were in the U.S. Of those, 606 were in New York state, up 5.2 percent over Wednesday. Number of new New York Covid-19 infections: 8,505, up 4 percent over Wednesday.
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