Brothers and Sisters of Local 863,

If you have applied for unemployment benefits in the last 2 weeks I am most certain that you have received a correspondence from the Ohio Unemployment office requesting an abounding amount of personal documentation to process your unemployment claim.

Our Local 863 leadership has been working diligently with Labor Relations and ODJFS Unemployment office to fix this issue for our local membership.

Originally we were told that there is a “glitch” in the unemployment website system that is incorrectly causing Ohioans using a mass layoff number to be “flagged” for fraudulent unemployment claims, but as of  today we are being told that all applicants, regardless of a mass layoff number are being asked to submit documents. Ohioans applying for unemployment benefits are required to submit this additional personal information due to the high amount of fraudulent claims.

This afternoon Local 863 leadership was successful in getting the unemployment office fraud department to agree to waive the personal information that is requested in the correspondence for ALL of our members that are currently on a temporary layoff. Labor relations is sending up (2) list of members. List (A): will include all members on TLO using mass layoff number 2100128 and List (B): All members in 6F that were on TLO the week prior and no mass layoff number. There will NOT be any new correspondence from the state in regards to the previous message that was sent out requesting information. Unemployment does not know how long it will take to complete this task as they are manually submitting our claims now. You will know that your information was corrected once your benefits change from “pending” to amount paid.

The ODJFS Fraud department did say that if your account has been locked out that is a RED flag that your account has been hacked into by a fraudulent claim and you will need to contact their fraud department immediately.

Again, I understand the frustration and concern that we have had in submitting this information requested by the state to process our unemployment claims, thank you for being patient as we worked with the unemployment office to bypass these issues.  As of now they are waiving this additional requested information for the members of Local 863 for this temporary layoff.

In Solidarity,

Eric Gadd