In a staggering plunge from best in the nation to worst, Hawaii’s once-vaunted joblessness rate of about 2.1% has now hit 37%. Yes, 1 out of 3 Hawaii workers is now out of work — many temporarily as the coronavirus shutdown persists, but many others, permanently.

This collective pain of unemployment has been exacerbated by the state’s woefully antiquated computer system that has buckled badly under the weight of some 250,000 jobless claims since March 1. The DOS mainframe was clunky enough pre-coronavirus, when the state Unemployment Insurance office’s seven staffers were handling 700 claims weekly — but the sudden tsunami of joblessness has drowned the office.

State Labor Director Scott Murakami inherited the archaic system, and is struggling to cobble together solutions. But the past weeks have revealed more fits than starts, as evidenced by the many desperate stories of people still waiting for their unemployment checks a month after filing.

After weeks of flailing, substantial manpower help finally came this week, with pop-up of a claims processing center in a cavernous ballroom at the Hawai‘i Convention Center. Staffed by volunteer state workers retrained to troubleshoot claims, the makeshift operation should have 400-500 more workers to push out checks, as a second shift is set to be added Monday. It has been a failure of the Ige administration that such needed hands were not deployed sooner for these vital tasks.

Also slowing down operations: Murakami this week revealed that a surge of malicious, bogus claims has slowed down processing of thousands of legit ones. The Labor Department has now forwarded the cases to the state Attorney General’s Office, which is urged to prosecute perpetrators to the fullest extent possible under law for the delays they’ve caused.

Further complicating an already enormous backlog is the imperative for the state to devise a new system to handle jobless claims from self-employed and independent contractors, so that they can receive funds under the federal pandemic unemployment assistance (PUA) program. Murakami is working with a mainland vendor on a cloud-based system and with the state Tax Department to verify records of now-jobless workers in this unique sector. Unfortunately, checks aren’t expected for at least a couple weeks — time that many living paycheck-to-paycheck don’t have.

Government has a bad habit of, year after year, stalling on crucial updates with studies and promises of fixes “some day.” As this pandemic and unemployment fallout now show, that “some day” is here — weeks ago, actually — and the promises have turned cruel.