90.5 WESA | By Tom Riese
Published February 26, 2025 at 5:30 AM EST
Pittsburgh-area advocates – some of whom waited nearly half a year to receive unemployment payments – say Harrisburg needs to speed up how it decides who deserves out-of-work pay benefits.
More than a dozen members of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee and Philadelphia Unemployment Project gathered at the state Capitol Tuesday to urge lawmakers and a state agency to grow its staff to clear its backlog of more than 19,000 appeals.
Among them was Lucille Prater-Holliday, who told WESA that she was laid off while recuperating from a kidney transplant, and was initially denied unemployment compensation from the state Department of Labor and Industry. Her appeal took more than five months, a waiting period she called “traumatic.”
“I was not able to purchase my anti-rejection [for organ transplant] medication without some help from family and friends,” Prater-Holliday said, adding car insurance payments also accrued. “It caused me a lot of trauma and stress, especially on my new kidney.”
When she finally got unemployment approval from the state, she had to “make up for everything that you didn’t pay for before,” Prater Holliday said. “So you really still don’t come out on top, you’re still in the hole.”
Delays are nothing new in the state’s unemployment compensation system, which often seemed overwhelmed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many workers were unable to get the benefits they were owed because of a backlog of claims that persisted for years after the first pandemic-related shutdowns. Due to the huge volume of calls, some workers said they could not even get through constant busy signals on the phone to speak to anyone at the Department of Labor and Industry to help them with their case.
Barney Oursler, director of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, acknowledged the administration of Gov. Josh Shapiro has improved many aspects of the program. He credited Department of Labor and Industry secretary Nancy Walker for speeding up initial reviews of unemployment claims, making agency documents less cryptic – “translating the ‘legalese’ in all their operations” – and improving wait times for in-person appointments and phone calls.
But the system, he said, “was broken before [the pandemic] – it was way understaffed.” And delays remain common in the appeals process, when a claim is denied and workers challenge it.
“We think they’ve missed this part of it,” said Oursler of the “disastrously long backlog” for appeals.
In fact, as other aspects of the system have improved, the backlog of appeals seems to be getting worse. In November 2023, about 20% of unemployment appeals were settled within 30 days. By November 2024, the labor department only ruled on 5% within a month, advocates said, citing data from the U.S. Department of Labor, submitted by the state.
A slow resolution of an appeal could mean people are evicted, lose their cars, or have to forgo medical care, advocates say. Rosilynn Gilliard, benefits advocate manager with the Mon Valley group, said one claimant she worked with was living out of his car when the car was repossessed.
“And he had never been on any systems – welfare, food stamps, nothing,” Gilliard said.
During a Tuesday budget hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Pittsburgh Democrat Aerion Abney asked Walker about plans to reduce the backlog.
Walker blamed the issues on short staffing in Allegheny and Philadelphia counties.
“We don’t have backlogs across the state,” she said. “We have backlogs in the Philadelphia area… the surrounding areas, and in Pittsburgh.”
Walker said the plan was to hire six additional “appeals referees” to help decide cases in those counties. Walker said by summertime, the department hopes to reduce the average appeal wait time of two months down to one month.
But advocates, relying on historical data, estimate that resolving the backlog would require 20 appeal referees. Gilliard said she wasn’t impressed by Walker’s testimony.
Haring just a half dozen referees, she said, was “going to have them in the backlog for at least the next year. [Walker] said the summer, so we’ve got to hold her to it.”
Kate Giammarise contributed reporting to this story.
