(TNS) — Pennsylvania’s labor department is looking to maintain its vastly improved service for unemployment filings — following the final clearance last year of the pandemic backlog — as well as step up labor law enforcement amidst a growing number of issues.
During a budget hearing before the state Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday, officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry said call wait times for unemployment inquiries are now averaging 27 minutes — as opposed to a year ago when wait times were still running around 80 minutes if you could even get into the queue.
The department is effectively clear of its nearly four-year struggle to deal with the fallout of COVID-19 when pandemic layoffs generated millions of unemployment claims virtually overnight.
When current L&I Secretary Nancy Walker came on board last year, the department still had tens of thousands of unresolved claims from Pennsylvanians who had lost work during the pandemic – and nearly as many potential fraud cases to deal with.
With last year’s budget allocation, “what we’ve been able to do is we’ve been able to hire 380 intake interviewers that gave us the ability to promote people in examiner positions,” Walker said of the unemployment administration.
“Within six months we were able to take that 40,000 [case] backlog of claims down to zero, and within seven months we were able to take the 34,000 fraud claims down to zero,” Walker told senators on Thursday.
The administration of the unemployment compensation (UC) program in Pennsylvania hinges on the department’s Service and Infrastructure Improvement Fund (SIIF), which receives a small cut of employees’ per-paycheck unemployment insurance premiums.
The department was granted $65 million in SIIF funding in the most recent budget, Walker said, and is asking for another $68 million in the upcoming 2024-25 budget year. That funding will sustain the current 1,622-strong unemployment administration workforce, and hopefully add more employees toward the department’s 1,800-person authorized complement.
“We want to continue the same level of service, and this is the complement level we need to have, to have the kind of service we have now,” Walker said.
L&I’s unemployment compensation workforce has historically fluctuated, with legislators being tempted to cut funding and staffing during good economic times when unemployment claims are low. Cuts to the SIIF authorization meant that the department went into the pandemic in 2020 with roughly half of the unemployment administration staff it did during the 2009 recession, officials said at the time.
Walker said Thursday that the last year has shown that a larger workforce handling unemployment filings simply results in better service. The department took over 80,000 calls last year from unemployed Pennsylvanians — more than double the calls answered in 2022, and not because of increased job loss but because a system that used to require 20 calls to get through to now gets picked up on the first try.
“That was the big ask last year, that I need to get more bodies into chairs, and what we’ve shown is that people in UC have worked really hard and done a spectacular job to get us where we need to be,” Walker said after Thursday’s hearing.
The department’s other major staffing initiative is hiring a dozen new labor law enforcement investigators in response to an increased caseload of violations. L&I’s current cadre of 27 investigators — which Walker is proposing to increase by another 12 positions — handle everything from child labor to prevailing wage laws to the misclassification of employees.
The latter issue has sparked legislation to crack down on businesses that miscategorize employees as independent contractors in order to skirt paying into unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation funds, potentially to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Investigations for labor law violations of all types were up 32% last year, Walker said Thursday, and child labor violations specifically were up 43%. While some violations may be technical in nature, others require boots on the ground.
“We’ve also had situations where we have 12-year-olds on commercial building projects,” Walker said. “We simply do not have the capacity, based on the staff we have right now — which is 27 investigators — to get to work sites” in a timely manner, Walker said.
By comparison, New Jersey — with a smaller population and workforce than Pennsylvania — has 70 labor law investigators and is adding 10 more, Walker said. With the economy still running hot and more projects funded by federal stimulus dollars set to begin, the need will continue for the department to “make sure that folks are playing by the rules,” she added.
