White House announces new UI reforms

The President has announced several initiatives and proposed changes to unemployment law, including federally-funded wage insurance (up to $5,000 a year for two years available to workers who accept jobs that pay less than $50,000 and which is less than their previous position), expanding eligibility for unemployment benefits to part-time workers (many states, including Wisconsin, limit unemployment benefits only to those seeking full-time work), mandating 26 weeks of state UI benefits (several states have reduced the maximum weeks of available benefits), creating a trigger for federally-funded Extended Unemployment Compensation (EUC) benefits, and mandating employer’s UI taxes are sufficient to a certain extent. Initial details about these proposals are available here.

These proposals are for the most part limited tweaks to the unemployment system. The biggest changes are making wage insurance broadly available and making UI benefits available to those seeking part-time work.

The wage insurance proposal provides an economic stimulus at a time when consumer spending and wage gains remain flat. But, this insurance also provides structural support for pushing wages down by creating a cushion for workers’ loss of income in subsequent jobs.

Expanding unemployment benefits to those limited to part-time work is a boon for those in part-time jobs, including many women who can only work part-time because of family and child-care responsibilities.

Such a change, however, presumes that unemployment benefits are generally a benefit to folks making unemployment claims. As evident in Wisconsin (and other states such as Michigan), receipt of unemployment is too often leading to concealment charges and penalties that turn unemployment benefits into a millstone of debt. As the numbers in Wisconsin reveal, benefit payments are declining and now are at record lows. Because claimants in Wisconsin can no longer collect unemployment benefits because of easy disqualifications like substantial fault or end up repaying benefits they do receive because of concealment charges arising from simple filing mistakes, unemployment taxes are collecting into a fund and will never be paid out. Until the feds address these kinds of changes in state unemployment systems, any expansion of UI eligibility will likely only make things worse for most claimants.