HARRISBURG (TNS) — Wait times for unemployment calls in Pennsylvania have dropped to an average of nine minutes – the shortest in six years – the state Labor Department said Tuesday, another signal that the system is back on track after the upheaval during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If we roll back time to when we came into office in January of 2023, people called sometimes a dozen times to get into the phone queue, and when they finally got in they waited for over an hour, sometimes as long as an hour and a half,” said Nancy Walker, secretary of the Department of Labor & Industry (L&I), Tuesday at an event in Harrisburg.

“So these are huge improvements.”

In the spring and summer of 2020, Pennsylvania’s unemployment compensation system was a nonstop topic of conversation in Harrisburg, and not for good reasons. The explosion of claims for unemployment benefits brought on by the pandemic put an unprecedented load on the system.

In just one week in March 2020, Pennsylvania saw 374,000 new claims filed, according to federal labor data, and the total unemployment roll topped one million workers for the first time in the state’s history.

Wait times ballooned, backlogs grew, and jobless Pennsylvanians found themselves having to hold on for months without their unemployment insurance payouts due to delays in claims processing.

Federal aid allowed L&I to hire outside contractors to help handle calls and paperwork, but even by 2023 — when Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration took over from former Gov. Tom Wolf — the department still had a backlog of 40,000 unresolved claims, and nearly as many unresolved cases of suspected fraud.

“The pandemic made it almost impossible for folks to get the benefits,” said Barney Oursler, director of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, an advocacy group for laid-off workers. “At one point near the end of the previous administration, there were 325,000 people who waited more than six months to get their unemployment benefits.”

A number of strategies were implemented to help fix the logjam, such as offering in-person unemployment case consultations at state offices across the commonwealth. L&I also hired 380 new intake interviewers for unemployment claims, using increased budget allocations financed by a small cut of workers’ per-paycheck unemployment insurance premiums.

By late 2023, the backlogs had been cleared, and turnaround times had dropped significantly. Emails, Walker noted, now receive a response within 24 hours.

“It took years for that [backlog] to build up, and you got rid of it in just seven months — no more backlog,” Gov. Shapiro said at the Tuesday event, complimenting Walker and her staff.

During the last full week in July, 9,914 Pennsylvanians filed initial unemployment claims, according to federal data — a normal caseload for this time of year, excluding the peak of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

If the commonwealth sees another economic downturn, officials said, L&I is now better positioned to scale up its unemployment division to meet the need.

Years of budget austerity in the early 2010s meant that the state went into the COVID-19 crisis with only about half the unemployment staff it had during the 2009 recession – a shortcoming that no one wants to see again.

“We are now staffed such that we would be able to scale to handle any increase in claims,” said L&I Deputy Secretary Maria Macus, who oversees the unemployment division.

“While our unemployment rate has been below the national average for 27 consecutive months, we need to be there for our workers, not just in these good times, but also when they suffer bad times,” Shapiro said.