Hawaii unemployment offices to reopen Dec. 1 with limited hours

Hawaii’s unemployment offices, closed since the early part of the pandemic last year, will reopen on a part-time basis beginning Dec. 1, the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations said Wednesday.

“We are expanding our services to include in- person services in light of decreased COVID-19 case counts and increased vaccination rates in Hawaii,” DLIR Director Anne Perreira- Eustaquio said in a news release.

Services from all DLIR programs will be available Wednesdays through Fridays, officials said, while telephone appointments for general unemployment insurance and claims adjudication services will continue on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Perreira-Eustaquio said the department will continue to assess its operations with an eye toward completely reopening for services during all regular state business days.

News of the office reopening was welcomed by Peter Yee, the moderator of the 27,000-member Hawaii Unemployment Updates and Support Group Facebook page.

“That’s a great development,” he said, “and long overdue.”

Yee said there are still folks having trouble connecting with DLIR and in need of face-to-face contact with an examiner to get the help they need.

Thousands of residents ran into difficulty obtaining unemployment benefits throughout the pandemic, and frustration with the agency’s operations for some has persisted.

“Sometimes there’s a lot of confusion,” Yee said, adding that he continues to hear complaints about dropped phone calls and inexplicably canceled appointments.

Department spokesman Bill Kunstman said an effort to modernize the Unemployment Insurance information technology program has been underway since March and should be finished by November of next year.

DLIR also has begun moving its call and adjudication center operations out of the Hawai‘i Convention Center and back into its Punchbowl Street headquarters. Those functions were moved into the convention center to help DLIR deal with the dramatic increase in demand caused by pandemic lockdowns and restrictions. Kunstman said the department should be totally moved out of the convention center by the end of the year.

In July, the department announced that its unemployment offices would reopen for walk-in claimants starting in September. But a wave of delta variant cases washed over the state, pushing daily case counts into the hundreds, and the department reversed its decision and kept its offices shuttered.

Barring a new surge in the virus, the offices will open next month. Anyone who comes in will be required to show proof of full vaccination or COVID-19 testing as required by an executive order of Gov. David Ige. Social distancing and mask-wearing rules also apply.

DLIR officials said they will continue to offer telephone appointments for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program and employer services Mondays through Fridays, and for claims adjudication and general unemployment insurance inquiries on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Access to all appointments is available at labor.hawaii.gov/ui/ appointments/.

For more information: bit.ly/3wrX0l3.