Editorial: Unemployment benefit delayed is justice denied

If you lost your job today, how long would you be able to support yourself and your family?

How long until you couldn’t make your house payment? How long until the electric bill wasn’t paid? When would you start balancing the car insurance against the homeowners insurance?

And none of those are the daily necessities. Food. Gas. The phone that connects you to employers or the internet that lets you apply for other jobs. How long could you go without the money that feeds that beast?

Scott Flanigan, 58, of Greensburg can tell you what it is like to go without an income. A self- employed beautician, he was one of those workers who found his paycheck vanish when Gov. Tom Wolf instituted precautionary shutdowns of nonessential businesses when the coronavirus pandemic hit in March. He was out of work until June.

Job loss happens to people every day, but this was different. A large chunk of those who lost their jobs were freelancers or the self-employed like Flanigan — people who typically don’t receive unemployment benefits when the work dries up.

The federal CARES Act passed in March provided for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, a mechanism to get money into the hands of Uber drivers or carpenters or wedding cake bakers whose jobs had dried up amid lockdowns.

Except Flanigan didn’t see that much touted assistance until the tail end of January.

There are plenty of reasons this was a problem, not the least of which was probably that Flanigan could have used the money back in May.

Another is that government is frequently long on promises and short on commitment. When talking about some well-intended programs, that’s frustrating. When talking about something as potentially life or death as a paycheck, the promise has to be backed up by a plan.

“What about those of us who are unemployed? It makes you feel like it’s an empty promise,” Flanigan said.

No one needs more of those from government. In some cases, it might be more helpful to have the powers that be simply say, “We feel bad for you but there is nothing we can do,” rather than make a commitment that can’t be kept or there is no mechanism to fulfill.

It is true that many of the pandemic plans in 2020 — and now as they keep flowing into 2021 — have been made on the fly, with law being written as it’s being proposed, like a train being built while it’s steaming down the tracks. But that’s no comfort to someone who lost a job because of a government decision — and isn’t being paid because of a lack of follow-through.

As more stimulus is being built in Washington and distributed through Harrisburg, leaders need to remember the people like Flanigan who depend on a promise to be reality.