State Rep Questions Illinois Unemployment Office’s Record High Overtime

One Springfield-area state Representative wants to know if Illinois is getting any value from the record number of overtime hours at the state’s unemployment office. State Rep. Mike Murphy yesterday questioned the 124-thousand hours of overtime at the Department of Employment Security. Murphy says some workers would have had to work nearly 20 hours a day to rack-up those kind of hours. IDES says the state’s union contract pays workers an hour-and-a-half of overtime for each hour worked. Still, Murphy says someone needs to see if all of that overtime actually helped with Illinois’ backlog of unemployment claims.