Pennsylvania’s unemployment centers have failed to keep up with last year’s surge in demand, and thousands of state residents have been thrust into a state of despair after spending hours listening to busy signals on phone lines and waiting days to receive responses to emails.

Add in erroneous payments, numerous fraud attempts and a shifting set of regulations, and the unemployment landscape has become all but impossible to navigate.

Now, the state has announced plans to hire some 500 new staffers to help process claims. The new employees will be retained and trained by June.

This is too little too late, emphasis on “too little.” The state should ramp up staffing as needed until the crisis diminishes and unemployment claims are processed in a reasonable amount of time.

Activists have called the hiring a step in the right direction but pointed out that Pennsylvanians have been struggling for months to pay rent and mortgages and bills and to put food on the table. As the economy struggles to right itself and the vaccine rolls out around the country, landlords and utility companies are growing impatient with delayed payments, but those without jobs do not have the means to pay them.

The backlog of claimants who have not received aid is not some meaningless statistic but real individuals and families struggling to keep afloat. These people have waited weeks or months, borrowing money on credit cards or accepting loans from family and friends to scrape by long enough until the assistance deposit drops. Unemployment checks are a necessary lifeline for those whose jobs were eliminated during the lockdown. It should not be so daunting to apply for and receive aid.

Due to the pandemic, evolving requirements meant additional hoops and red tape. Pennsylvania’s unemployment offices had added more than 700 employees since March to help process claims, and the government delayed a system upgrade that would likely have slowed the process significantly. But the fruits of these efforts have revealed this was far from enough.

A Department of Labor & Industry official has said that the latest batch of new hires could be swelled to 1,000 employees but that there isn’t a definitive metric to trigger that hiring. The answer is obvious: How about hiring until the state clears its backlog and processes claims within days or a week instead of months? The department has failed its citizens. It’s time to learn from its recent mistakes and hire the manpower it needs to be efficient.

— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS