Community & Editorial
A temporary safety net
Senate should concur with House’s balanced approach on jobless benefits
Last week, the State House of Representatives approved a bill that will grant employers in Washington hundreds of millions of dollars in Unemployment Insurance tax rebates in the next few years – and billions in savings after the economy recovers.
But Boeing and business lobbying groups in Olympia are opposing the bill because SSB 5693 also includes some modest benefit improvements.
They say that Gov. Chris Gregoire’s temporary economic-stimulus boost in benefits, which the Legislature enacted earlier this session, and which expires at the end of 2009, is all that workers should get. So they are urging the State Senate to strip SSB 5693 of all benefit increases and pass a version that makes their tax breaks even bigger.
What are the “benefit increases”? Actually, they are things that our unemployed workers already get now, or did get for decades until very recently. In addition to giving employers hundreds of millions in business tax breaks, SSB 5693 would:
• Restore the multiplier used to calculate benefits to 4.0, where it was from 1970 until being lowered to 3.85 in 2005. This means your weekly benefits are 3.85 percent of the average of your two highest-earning quarters in the year before you lost your job. If legislators “restore to four,” UI benefits would increase $8 to $19 per week, costing the system $20-30 million per year depending on unemployment levels. This increase wouldn’t happen until 2010, when the temporary stimulus increase expires.
• Maintain an important Supreme Court decision granting the commissioner of the state Department of Employment Security some flexibility in determining whether workers who have quit their jobs for extraordinary reasons should receive benefits. The court found the statute’s previous list of specific “good-cause quits” was too restrictive and unfair to workers in unique circumstances. (The case involved a woman who quit because her employer regularly berated employees, including while they stood in the rain.)
One of the most important ingredients of trying to help our economy recover and put people back to work involves helping the recession’s biggest victims: people who have lost their jobs and the businesses that rely on their patronage to stay afloat.
That’s why we have Unemployment Insurance. It’s not merely an exercise in government compassion for people who are down on their luck, nor is it some kind of government handout. It is an important temporary safety net, not just for laid-off workers and their families, but for our state’s economy.
These benefits provide critically important economic stability to communities devastated by layoffs. This money is not saved or invested out-of-state. It’s spent immediately – and locally – on necessities like housing, food and transportation.
If the State Senate refuses to concur with the House-approved version of SSB 5693 and strips these benefit improvements, then on Jan. 1, 2010, weekly benefits will effectively be cut between $45 and $71. Restoring the multiplier to 4.0 on that date – where it was for decades – will mitigate that drop by $8 to $19 a week.
This is not an extravagant benefit increase, but it is meaningful to people who are struggling in a recession. To a family receiving the minimum unemployment benefit, $8 a week represents a gallon of milk ($2.79), a dozen eggs ($1.69), two loaves of bread ($3.20), and a couple of apples ($.68). Or it can pay for a few gallons of gas, or for copying and mailing a few more resumes to aid in the job search.
As for the commissioner discretion on good-cause quits, business lobbyists want to take this away, even though it has been used so infrequently that its costs are negligible. They just don’t like the idea of somebody quitting and getting benefits. But how can they possibly argue that maintaining the law as it stands today is a “benefit increase”? It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test.
It is also absurd for business lobbyists to suggest, as they have, that the benefit changes in SSB 5693 will “increase business taxes.” The state projects that if the Senate concurs with the House-approved bill, employers will still save $224 million over the next six years and significantly more once the economy begins to recover.
Suggesting SSB 5693 will raise taxes as opposed to slightly lowering tax rebates, is just plain untruthful. That’s like saying our federal taxes went up because Congress convinced President Obama to scale back originally proposed middle-class tax cut in the federal stimulus package. Does the subsequent approval of a smaller tax cut mean our taxes went up? Of course not.
The Washington State Labor Council and other advocates for families who have lost their income are strongly urging the State Senate to concur with SSB 5693. In a year where the recession is forcing horrible cuts in public programs and safety nets for the most vulnerable people in our state, this legislation represents a rare opportunity for state lawmakers to help struggling families, employers and the economy. n
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