Half in Ten: From Poverty to Prosperity » Idaho http://halfinten.org The Campaign to Cut Poverty in Half in Ten Years Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:28:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 UI Reforms Reach Workers in 34 States http://halfinten.org/ui-reforms-reach-workers-in-34-states http://halfinten.org/ui-reforms-reach-workers-in-34-states#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:21:42 +0000 jrosenthal http://halfinten.org/?p=1510 This January, Half in Ten joined with the National Employment Law Project,  NELP, to urge Congress to include urgent reforms to the Unemployment Insurance system in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA.  The antiquated unemployment insurance system had failed to ensure equal benefits for low-wage workers, part-time workers, workers who left work due to “compelling family reasons,” and long-term unemployed individuals.  Low-wage workers are only one-third as likely to collect unemployment benefits, even though they have double the chances of being unemployed.  For this reason, UI reform was one of the 12 steps that the Center for American Progress Task Force on Poverty identified to cut poverty in half in ten years.

Congress listened to advocates, and included unemployment reform in ARRA, allocating $7 billion for the project. And these reforms have begun to reach unemployed workers across the country.  Earlier this week, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a report (PDF) detailing the “unprecedented wave” of unemployment insurance reforms that has swept across the country since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) became law on February 17th, 2009.  

In just four months, 25 states have enacted reforms to modernize and expand their unemployment insurance programs, either by considering a worker’s most recent work history and earnings to determine their qualification for UI benefits or specifically offering unemployment benefits to historically-disadvantaged employees, such as women, part-time workers, and the long term unemployed. The states that made these reforms were Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and West Virginia. These states joined the 8 states and the District of Columbia that had already made these reforms.

In addition to permanent UI reform, 21 states with high unemployment rates have also extended unemployment benefits to cover an extra 13-20 weeks.  Of the $7 billion in federal incentive funds, the NELP report estimates that $3.65 billion will be provided to the states in order to help over one million jobless workers collect the benefits they need.

Catherine Rampell, the economics editor of nytimes.com, emphasizes that most of these state unemployment insurance reforms are new changes that indeed expand program eligibility, as opposed to “technical ‘fixes’ to existing laws.” The NELP report further highlights the broad bi-partisan support of these reforms, indicating that legislation has been signed and enacted by nine Republican governors. About a dozen states are still in debate over reforms.

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