Nearly four months after a court-ordered deadline for the Virginia Employment Commission (VEC) to address a backlog of requests for assistance expired, thousands of unemployed Virginians remain without any help from the state.
According to NBC News , as of October, nearly 440,000 claims for unemployment remained on the state’s backlog. This is despite a May 2021 court decision which required Virginia to formally respond to at least 92,000 of its backlogged claims by Labor Day last September.
On Wednesday, January 5, legal aid groups working on the class action suit agreed to dismiss the lawsuit. According to the proposal, the VEC “has met or substantially achieved the various performance standards and benchmarks set forth” in the lawsuit.
The dropping of the suit comes as the Democratic Party statewide and nationally seeks to accustom the population to an unending pandemic in which nearly 900,000 Americans have lost their lives and over 500,000 people contract COVID-19 daily.
Despite the legal aid groups deciding to relent in their charges against the unemployment agency, ABC News reported “another backlog” of benefits appeals from tens of thousands of Virginians in November who had been wrongly denied benefits by the VEC. “That backlog has grown. It’s now up to about 89,000 cases or so,” Pat Levy-Levelle, a lawyer with the Virginia Legal Aid Justice Center, told WAVY.com last week.
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