TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

Key proposals

• Federal financing: Address chronic underfunding and incentives to reduce outlays at the expense of workers by paying for all regular and extended UI benefits with federal dollars. Absent a switch to a wholly federally financed system, reform tax rate calculations and state trust fund targets to strengthen support for workers and stabilize the system.
• Taxable wage base: To make UI’s finances fairer and more efficient, broaden the taxable wage base for unemployment insurance to be equal to the wage base for Social Security.
• Tax rate: In a federally financed system, reduce employer incentives to block worker claims by reforming “experience rating” to determine the employer tax rate based on changes in hours employees work, not unemployment insurance claims. In a federal–state financing system, reconsider “experience rating” and base state trust fund targets on industry-adjusted per capita targets, not “high cost multiple” systems that encourage states to slash awards to replenish trust fund accounts.
• Recessions: In a federally financed system, acknowledge the economy-boosting benefits of unemployment insurance benefits during recessions by paying for them with general revenue. In a federal–state financing system, use automatic triggers to provide federal financial assistance to states.
• Classification of workers: Require states to implement “ABC” tests that prevent employers from circumventing taxes by reclassifying employees as contractors, and require large businesses that use a lot of contractors to pay unemployment insurance tax on their contractors.

Introduction

The problem

States and the federal government jointly finance unemployment insurance (UI) in the United States through state and federal taxes imposed on wages and paid by employers, with a portion of those taxes likely passed through to workers in the form of lower pay. During normal economic times, states pay for the benefits their workers receive, and the federal government provides grants to pay for the cost of administering the program. The federal government also finances 50% of the Extended Benefits (EB) program.1 In recent recessions, it has paid 100% of EB costs as well as the costs for additional non-EB benefit extensions.

The way we pay for unemployment insurance benefits explains many of the program’s problems today. The desire to attract businesses and jobs puts pressure on states to keep their tax rates low. To do so, they limit benefits recipiency (the share of unemployed workers receiving benefits), decrease the amount of benefits workers receive, or both. Employers also have an incentive to make it harder for workers to claim benefits—for example, by filing challenges and appeals to worker claims—because the UI taxes firms pay rise when their workers collect UI benefits, a structure known as “experience rating.”

For both employers and states, pressure to reduce the benefits flowing to workers is especially intense when benefits are needed most: during and just after major recessions. When profit margins are slim, employers may be more likely to try to save money by keeping their UI tax rate as low as possible.

Federal law requires states to save their UI funds in a trust fund account and encourages them to keep adequate funds in it. During past recessions, these accounts have run empty in a number of states. To refill their accounts and get back into balance, many states slash benefits. In the wake of the Great Recession, for example, nine states cut the number of weeks individuals could get benefits from the traditional 26 to as few as 12 (Leachman 2015).2 As of April 2021, state legislators in at least three states (Iowa, Louisiana, and Tennessee) had proposed cutting the benefit duration to 12 weeks in response to low trust fund balances following the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (Golshan and Delaney 2021). The consequences of inadequate program financing fall squarely on the most disadvantaged workers, disproportionately affecting communities of color, as described in Section 3, covering eligibility.

The solution

Current financing of the UI system incentivizes employers and states to obstruct the delivery of UI benefits. Redesigning the way benefits are financed could create a system that would more effectively deliver UI.

Implementation

Financing UI benefits at the federal, rather than the state, level is the most logical way to ensure adequate funding for and the equitable distribution of UI benefits. If policymakers choose to leave benefit financing primarily to the states, however, significant improvements could still be made.

Federal policymakers could approximate “first-best” reforms by (a) raising the federal taxable wage base (which would require states to raise their own taxable wage bases), (b) reforming experience rating, (c) making federal financial assistance to states for funding UI benefits more predictable by tying it to automatic triggers, (d) ensuring that firms do not have incentives to outsource or misclassify workers as contractors, and (e) basing state trust fund targets on industry-adjusted per capita targets, not the current “high cost multiple” system, which encourages tax and benefit cuts.

Funding unemployment benefits with federal financing

In normal economic times, state UI benefits are the only support available to unemployed workers; during economic crises, they are often the only support preventing workers from falling into distress. But rather than ensure that these benefits are adequate, states compete in a race to the bottom, in an effort to attract firms. Employers shift production and workers to low-tax states (Guo 2020). They are especially likely to exploit differences across states in the taxation of part-time workers (U.S. GAO 1993). These moves hurt women, who are disproportionately likely to work part time, and people of color, who are disproportionately likely to work part time but want full-time work (Golden and Kim 2020).

Cutting taxes requires cutting benefits, making the race to the bottom evident in every aspect of the UI system (Galle 2019). After the 2009 recession, 10 states dramatically cut the duration of their UI benefits, and others failed to adjust the maximum benefit level for inflation for more than a decade, eroding benefits (CRS 2019; Smith, Wilson, and Bivens 2014). States that have most aggressively courted business by cutting benefits the most are also those states granting UI benefits to lower shares of separated workers (Desilver 2020; U.S. DOL-ETA 2021a; U.S. Census Bureau 2019). Indeed, historical data on the recipiency rate suggest that states tightening requirements in times of economic distress have contributed to subsequent declines in recipiency rates that have never ascended back to mid-last century highs exceeding 50%, and hover around 28% today (as of 2019) (U.S. DOL-ETA 2021b). By capitulating to employer threats to move jobs out of state, local officials may see themselves as winning a competition with their neighbors. But the result is a less effective automatic stabilizer to assist displaced workers during recessions, leaving the federal government holding the bag to pay for other safety-net programs.

Policy proposal: Fund regular unemployment benefits and the full cost of extended benefits with federal financing

No solution short of federal financing will fully overcome these problems; if states can compete with one another to lower taxes, they will. If their revenue is lower, they will find new ways to reduce recipiency rates. Following the Great Recession, for example, when federal law temporarily constrained states from reducing benefit amounts, they cut the duration of benefits (CRS 2019; Smith, Wilson, and Bivens 2014). Some states also erected new administrative barriers (Wentworth 2017). For example, a new online system in Massachusetts increased one form of benefit denial by 950%, and delayed claims processing by more than six weeks on average. Florida increased one category of procedural denials by 180%, and another by 400%.

Financing at least the cost of the minimum regular UI benefits we have described with federal money—building on the existing federal financing of program administration and extended benefits—could eliminate this race to the bottom.3 Removing this competition would remove the greatest barrier to adequate benefit financing.4 A federally financed regular UI benefit could be financed in several ways, as shown below.

Increasing the taxable wage base

Currently, states and the federal government finance UI almost exclusively through taxes on employers. The total tax an employer owes is based on the product of its tax rate and the taxable wage base, the portion of each employee’s salary that is considered when calculating the tax owed. For the current federal UI tax—the Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) tax—the federal government taxes only the first $7,000 of each employee’s wages. State wage bases cannot be lower than the federal wage base; they currently range from $7,000 to about $53,000, with most of them less than $15,000 (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020c). The taxable maximums for UI wage bases are far lower than the taxable maximum wage bases for other programs. For example, the wage cap for the Social Security portion of the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) for 2021 was $142,800. The UI federal wage base has failed to keep up with inflation; it was $3,000 in 1939, or more than $55,000 in 2021 dollars, almost eight times its current value of $7,000 (Gould-Werth 2020a).

Policy proposal: Set the taxable wage base for unemployment insurance equal to the wage base for Social Security

We propose increasing the federal UI taxable wage base to a level equal to the current Social Security taxable wage base and indexing it to inflation. Raising the wage base threshold would allow for much lower rates, which would be more economically efficient, because they would reduce the incentive to attempt to avoid the tax. If UI financing were shifted to the federal level and the taxable federal wage base broadened, revenues could increase without an accompanying rate hike.

A higher wage base cap would also better align the constituencies that pay the tax and draw benefits from it. For example, a worker in Vermont who earns $10,000 a year has taxes levied on 100% of her wages and has 100% of her wages considered when setting benefits, whereas a worker who earns $50,000 has taxes levied on only 28% of her earnings, but has 92% of her wages used when determining her benefit level (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020b; Vermont DOL 2021). Such a system thus imposes a greater relative burden on the lower-wage worker.

Raising the wage cap would also reduce the incentive to prefer a small number of high-earning workers over a large number of low earners. With a low cap, an employer incurs greater tax liability if she hires two $20,000 earners than if she hires one $40,000 earner. For instance, in Vermont, where there is a 2021 cap of $14,100, an employer with a 1% rate would pay $141 in state UI tax for the $40,000 earner, but $282 for the two $20,000 earners. The system thus disincentivizes employers to employ low-wage workers.5

Under the current federal–state UI system, state wage bases cannot be lower than the federal wage base by law. Raising the federal UI cap to the Social Security cap would therefore also raise all state caps, generating all of the benefits described above.6

Changing the tax rate formulation

Average UI tax rates are low in the United States. The federal rate is 0.6%,7 and most state rates average 1%–2% (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020a). Employers pay the federal government $42 a year for each full-time, year-round employee (0.6% times the $7,000 federal wage base). In Missouri, a fairly low-tax state, the average employer would pay another 1% tax on the state wage base of $11,500, for a state-tax total of $115 per worker. Nationwide, the total average tax was about $267 per worker in 2020; the average over several recent years was a bit higher, at $350 (U.S. DOL-OUI 2021; Pavosevich 2020).

Within a state, different employers face different tax rates, depending on the employer’s experience with unemployment—a method of setting the tax rate known as “experience rating.” In all U.S. jurisdictions except Alaska, the rate is based on the UI benefits collected by separated workers. Every benefit recipient must be traced back to one (or more) previous employers. Employers with a higher ratio of benefits awarded to payroll pay higher rates than others up to a cap.8 In Alaska, employers instead pay a higher tax when they cut payroll, regardless of whether their employees successfully claim benefits.

The basic logic of experience rating is similar to the rationale for adjusting auto or home insurance rates upward after the insured files a claim. Layoffs impose costs on society, including the expense of providing UI benefits. Without experience rating, employers would not take account of these costs, leading to excessive job turnover (Alessie and Bloemen 2004; Karni 1999). There is strong evidence that experience rating reduces layoffs as well as seasonal employment (Albertini and Fairise 2018; Anderson and Meyer 2000; Baicker, Goldin, and Katz 1998; Ratner 2013; Woodbury 2004).

As currently designed, though, experience rating also encourages employers to prevent their employees from receiving adequate benefits. Benefit denials increased by 50%–66% in Washington state after it adopted experience rating (Anderson and Meyer 2000). Employer tactics include failing to provide information about benefits; encouraging employees not to file; challenging employee claims;9 or structuring their workforce to reduce eligibility, such as by using part-time workers or contractors, and shifting job sites to states where taxes are lower and benefits less generous (Anderson and Meyer 2000; de Raaf, Motte, and Vincent 2005; Gould-Werth 2016; Hyatt and Kralj 1995; Thomason and Pozzebon 2002; Vroman et al. 2017).

Grocery worker fired for taking health leave is initially denied benefits

Justin Grevencamp, Maine

I worked at an organic grocery-cafe in Brewer for two years. It was a beloved, locally owned small business. I developed new recipes and handled important catering orders. I took a two-week unpaid leave to deal with health issues, and when I returned I was told there was no more work for me. When I filed for UI, the store owners told the agency I had quit. At the appeal, one owner was upset that their taxes would go up because I had claimed UI. I received my benefits, but I was stunned that people I considered friends had tried to block me from receiving them.

Policy proposal: In a federally financed system, base the unemployment insurance tax rate on changes in hours employees work, not unemployment insurance claims

Because the U.S. lacks the employment protections common in most other developed economies, there is a strong case for a system that still imposes costs on employers when they terminate workers but does not encourage employers to prevent their workers from obtaining unemployment benefits. We suggest removing incentives to prevent UI claims for separated workers by using the full-time equivalent (“FTE”) or “hours-worked variation” experience rating method, similar to the method used in Alaska.10 In the FTE method, employers are rated based on how much the hours their employees worked changed, on a quarterly basis, over a three-year period. Increases in hours are not given as much weight as decreases.

Because employers are charged based on changes to payroll rather than benefit claims, these methods should make employers indifferent about whether their separated workers obtain benefits.11 Notably, until the tenure of its latest governor, Alaska’s recipiency rate was among the highest in the country (as of 2020, it had declined to around the national mean).

To calculate their tax rate in a given quarter under the FTE method, employers compute the average of the total hours worked in each of the 12 preceding quarters. They then calculate the change from each of these quarters to the next, dividing this change by the average quarterly total hours over the 12-quarter measuring period.12 For increases, the resulting product is discounted by a special weighting factor. The taxpayer’s final rating factor is the average of these 12 changes over the three-year rating period.13 Employers are then ranked and tax rates assigned as in existing experience rating systems. For more details, refer to the text box, “Calculating the tax rate under the FTE method.” Under federal financing, employers should be ranked regionally (by state or Metropolitan Statistical Area, for example), rather than nationally, to account for local variations in industry, seasonality, and other economic conditions.

Using hours worked as the base unit of measure offers a few modest advantages over Alaska’s method (based on payroll) or one based on the number of employees. Using the number of employees on the payroll cannot account for reduction in hours. It either weights full- and part-time employees equally or discounts employees who work part time, allowing employers to game the system by reducing work hours. Payroll-based systems may favor high-wage over low-wage workers, rewarding business models with a small number of highly skilled employees (Vroman et al. 2017). Such a system could result in lower levels of employment for less-educated workers.

Many states do not presently collect hours-worked data, but former U.S. Department of Labor officials have described this as only a minor obstacle (Miller and Pavosevich 2019). As explained later, expanding state collection of hours data would have other advantages as well, such as improving the data available through the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and allowing for implementation of our proposal to base worker eligibility on hours, not wages.

Policy proposal: In an experience rating system, penalize employers who consistently remain at the tax rate cap

In contemporary experience rating systems, some firms are indifferent to additional layoffs because the tax rate is capped—that is, the rate they pay for UI will not rise if additional workers are laid off. We recommend adopting the suggestion of Vroman et al. (2017) of imposing a penalty on firms that persistently remain at the cap (for three years or more, for example).

Policy proposal: In a federal–state financing system, base state trust fund targets on industry-adjusted per capita targets

In a system with significant state financial contributions, state savings targets should be reformed to be based on industry-adjusted per-capita targets, not the current “high cost multiple” system that favors cutting benefits rather than raising revenues when trust fund balances are depleted. Currently, in good times, states deposit excess UI revenues in a trust fund account, to be drawn on during recessions. Regulations encourage states to maintain an adequate balance, based on a calculation known as the “average high cost multiple” (AHCM). Because the AHCM is based on expected benefit awards, states can achieve their fiscal targets by slashing awards instead of adding revenue (ACUC 1996).14

Thus, in a system with significant state contributions, the AHCM should be replaced with a system in which state savings targets are based on industry-adjusted per capita targets. That is, state trust fund adequacy would be calculated using nationwide projected benefit costs per capita multiplied by the state population (see Galle 2019 for a complete description). This figure could then be modified to reflect each state’s mix of local industries and those industries’ historic nationwide turnover rates.

It may also be desirable to eliminate experience rating in a system that is mostly state financed. Although a portion of UI taxes are passed along to workers in the form of lower wages, in a competitive industry an employer cannot offer lower wages than its rivals, so that with experience rating higher-taxed businesses must bear the costs themselves (Gruber 1997; Anderson and Meyer 2000). This encourages business owners to seek out lower rates, contributing to the race to the bottom that federalizing the financing system would avoid.

Paying for unemployment benefits during recessions

UI payouts during recessions provide large positive spillovers to the economy, including to workers and businesses that do not draw on UI (Elmendorf 2011). The cost of financing this economic stimulus should therefore be widely shared, though the method for doing so may vary depending on whether UI is wholly federally financed or is partly left to states.

Policy proposal: In a federally financed system, pay for benefits with general revenue during recessions

If funding for UI is made wholly federal, we recommend that benefits be paid out of general federal revenues during recessions, as they have been in recent episodes. As with Social Security, there are economic and political advantages to “benefit taxation,” in which taxes are explicitly linked to a particular social insurance product. In recessions, however, the UI system should be able to borrow from general Treasury funds without having to repay its borrowing via higher UI taxes later.

Policy proposal: In a federal–state financing system, use automatic triggers to provide federal financial assistance to states for unemployment insurance

Even if states are left to bear some of the costs of standard UI during normal times, the federal government should pay all of the cost during recessions. Federal dollars already pay for half of extended benefits, and in recent recessions that has been expanded to 100%, so extending federal support to base-period UI is not a dramatic shift and is economically justified. Recessions hit some regions harder than others; national financing allows states to share risk. States also face structural obstacles to countercyclical spending (Galle 2019). For example, it is politically difficult to maintain reserve funds at the state level, because today’s taxpayers may be living or doing business elsewhere when the rainy day arrives.

Federal financing for base-period UI can be expanded without major changes to the current structure. Following the Great Recession, Congress eventually granted states significant financial relief. Under current law, states accessing federal financing must risk the possibility that they will face swift repayment obligations as well as significant interest and added charges before Congress eventually provides them with relief. To eliminate this risk, we recommend that when EB is triggered (as described in Section 5, benefits duration), states become automatically eligible for low-interest or interest-free financing for base-period UI as well, repayable over a period that does not coincide with the state’s recovery from its downturn. Even greater federal support is possible; for example, severe downturns could trigger automatic loan forgiveness. That would in effect offer federal reinsurance to state trust funds, relieving some of the financial pressure on them to compete over low benefits.

Including self-employed and misclassified workers

State and federal UI taxes apply only to the wages of employees. To circumvent the tax, many employers therefore claim that their workers are contractors, not employees. Legal tests to distinguish genuine employees from contractors are usually complicated and thus costly and time-consuming to enforce. Other employers respond to UI incentives through actual (not merely nominal) changes in their workforce, shifting traditional full-time employees into more-precarious, less-rewarding contract work. The rise of large digital platform-based businesses, such as Airbnb and Uber, has drawn a growing attention to the plight of workers in these types of positions (Ravenelle 2019).

Policy proposal: Require states to implement the “ABC” test

To ensure that enterprises pay their fair share of UI taxes, rather than shift their burdens to others, federal law should make it more difficult for employers to recharacterize taxable wages as untaxed contractor payments. An important starting point is to require states to implement a version of the “ABC” test. Under this legal rule, a service provider to a business is presumed to be an employee unless the individual (a) is free from the direction and control of the business, (b) provides labor outside the usual course of the business, and (c) is customarily engaged in their own independently established business. A few states already apply versions of the ABC test, at least for select industries (Doroghazi 2019). It should be a national gold standard. Alternative legal approaches, such as the 20-factor balancing test applied by the IRS, have proven to be unpredictable, highly manipulable, and expensive and burdensome to administer.

Policy proposal: Require large 1099 payers to pay unemployment insurance tax on their contractors

As an additional disincentive to misclassification and efforts to replace the security and benefits of a steady job with the uncertainty of contractor status, we recommend taxing contractor payments at the same rate as employee hours. Imposing UI taxes on contractor payments would also bring in contributions from a self-employed population that, under our proposal in the benefits chapter, would receive greatly expanded benefits under the jobseeker’s allowance (See Section 3, on eligibility, in this report).

To reduce the administrative burden on small businesses and households, only relatively large businesses would be subject to the UI tax, and even they would be required to pay it on the wages of only some workers. Individuals who receive only very small payments from a given payer or who provide services only for the nonbusiness purposes of the payer would be exempt. The UI tax would be imposed only on payments to individuals for whom the payer is obligated to issue a Form 1099 (currently contractors paid at least $600 a year for the payer’s business purpose). For simplicity, only large firms, such as companies with more than $1 million in annual payroll or profits, might be required to pay the UI tax on contractors. If this threshold is considered too low, an additional threshold of 50 total combined employees and contractors could be applied. Both of these measures could be phased in, with the UI tax on 1099 earners starting at 10% of the full tax rate and stepping up 10% for each additional $1 million in payroll/profits to a cap of 100%. If a worker threshold is also used, the rate could step up by 10% per 25 workers, with the actual tax rate imposed being the greater of the payroll/profit- or worker-determined rate. Whichever threshold is used, related entities such as companies that share the same owners would be counted together when determining whether the firm crosses the threshold, to prevent gaming the system.

Endnotes

1. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “Extended Benefits are available to workers who have exhausted regular unemployment insurance benefits during periods of high unemployment. The basic Extended Benefits program provides up to 13 additional weeks of benefits when a State is experiencing high unemployment. Some States have also enacted a voluntary program to pay up to seven additional weeks (20 weeks maximum) of Extended Benefits during periods of extremely high unemployment. Extended Benefits may start after an individual exhausts other unemployment insurance benefits (not including Disaster Unemployment Assistance or Trade Readjustment Allowances). Not everyone who qualified for regular benefits qualifies for Extended Benefits…. The weekly benefit amount of Extended Benefits is the same as the individual received for regular unemployment compensation. The total amount of Extended Benefits that an individual could receive may be fewer than 13 weeks (or fewer than 20 weeks).” U.S. DOL-ETA 2021c.

2. The states were Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

3. We do not mean to rule out the possibility that states would voluntarily impose their own taxes to pay for benefits more expansive than those we propose. Added benefits might also be fully or partially federally funded.

4. If the taxable wage base were raised, workers in high-wage states would cost their employers more in UI taxes than workers in low-wage states. But equal tax rates would ensure that this difference was driven by labor costs, not taxes. The marginal dollar of salary would cost the same no matter what state it was paid in.

5. The other side of this argument is that raising the cap could discourage pay raises and potentially full-time work. In many jurisdictions, the cap is now so low that it is effectively a fixed tax per employee, leaving employers indifferent to wage levels. (For a summary of the evidence that rated taxes affect only the “extensive,” or hiring, margin, see Guo and Johnston 2020.) With a higher cap, pay raises potentially lead to a UI tax increase. Depending on other UI rules, this principle can also translate into a preference for part-time employees: Once it is no longer advantageous to hire one $40,000 salary worker instead of two $20,000 salary workers, an employer might split a single position into two, perhaps to take advantage of other provisions that turn on full-time versus part-time status (Guo and Johnston 2020).

6. If states continue to pay UI benefits through state trust funds, expanding the wage base could help strengthen state finances (ACUC 1996; Vroman et al. 2017). Although states could cut rates in response to an expansion of their wage base, analysts predict that many states would still bring in additional revenue on net (CBO 2012).

7. The full federal rate is 6%, but it is reduced to 0.6% in states that are in compliance with federal law. The Department of Labor has never found a state to be so out of compliance, so the 6% rate has never been triggered.

8. Most states still use an antiquated variant (the “reserve ratio” method), in which long-standing employers can become insensitive at the margin to further changes in employment. Under this system, high-turnover firms are strongly incentivized to outsource work to contractors (Pavosevich 2020).

9. It does not appear that there are any strong reasons to encourage employers to challenge employee benefits. McLeod and Malcolmson (1989) argue that if employers are not rated based on their employees’ benefits, they will not be incentivized to share with government officials information that could indicate a fraudulent claim. We could not identify any evidence that this is the case. Moreover, fraud reduction is small compared with the direct impacts of experience rating. For example, recipiency rates vary dramatically between high- and low-recipiency states, with workers in high-recipiency states receiving benefits more than twice as often as workers in low- recipiency states (Desilver 2020). It is unlikely that differences in fraud detection explain a meaningful portion of these differences.

10. Our proposal builds on work by Vroman et al. (2017) and Miller and Pavosevich (2019). Miller and Pavosevich (2019) propose alternative systems modeled on Alaska’s payroll decline method. Vroman et al. (2017) conclude that none of the alternatives they modeled was clearly superior to the best options now in practice, but they did not consider the refinements Miller and Pavosevich propose, such as the use of the “average quarterly hours” measure we describe below.

11. Municipal and nonprofit employers often are not formally experience rated, but instead may opt to “self-insure,” which means that they pay into the system only when their employees claim benefits. Our proposal would therefore leave these employers with strong incentives to prefer lower benefits and to contest claims. It is likely all employers should be taxed by the same rules.

12. Although the use of average quarterly total hours—as Miller and Pavosevich (2019) propose—adds some complexity, it solves a key problem Vroman et al. (2017) identify. Consider a 10-worker firm that lays off all 10 workers in Q1 and rehires them in Q3. There is a 100% decline from Q1 to Q2 and an infinite percentage increase between Q2 and Q3. If the firm lays off and rehires only nine workers, there is a 90% reduction between Q1 and Q2 and a 900% increase between Q2 and Q3. Both these scenarios would produce highly inaccurate results for the rehiring employers. Using average total hours smooths these changes, so that in the second scenario, for instance, there is about a 130% reduction (9/[(10+1+10)]/3)) in the number of employees followed by a 130% increase. Applying the discount factor, W, to the increase would result in a net reduction in hours, reflecting the fact that the firm made some use of the UI system.

13. For small employers, the quarterly components could be weighted by the quarter’s total hours, a step that would tend to reduce the volatility of the measure (Vroman et al. 2017).

14. For example, suppose a state is projected to average $1 billion in UI spending during high-cost periods but it has only $750 million in its trust fund. A target AHCM of 90% would require the state to hold at least $900 million in its trust fund. If the state cuts benefits, its projected spending might fall to $800 million, allowing the target trust fund balance to be only $720 million. The state has cut its way to its target.

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Miller, Michael, and Robert Pavosevich. 2019. “Alternative Methods of Experience Rating Unemployment Insurance Taxes.” Public Budgeting & Finance 39, no. 4 (Winter): 28–47.

Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). 2019. The OECD Tax-Benefit Model for Canada: Description of Policy Rules for 2019.

Pavosevich, Robert. 2020. “The Cost of Layoffs in Unemployment Insurance Taxes.” BLS Monthly Labor Review, April 2020.

Ratner, David D. 2013. “Unemployment Insurance Experience Rating and Labor Market Dynamics.” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Finance and Economics Discussion Series No. 2013-86, December 2013.

Ravenelle, Alexandrea J. 2019. Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy. Oakland: University of California Press.

Smith, Joshua, Valerie Wilson, and Josh Bivens. 2014. State Cuts to Jobless Benefits Did Not Help Workers or Taxpayers. Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper #380, July 2014.

Thomason, Terry, and Silvanna Pozzebon. 2002. “Determinants of Firm Workplace Health and Safety and Claims Management Practices.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 55, no. 2 (January): 286–307.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. “Table DP05. 2019 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates Selected Population Profiles.” Accessed June 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2020a. “Estimated Employer Contribution Rates Calendar Year 2020” (data table). September 2020.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2020b. “Monetary Entitlement” in Comparison of State Unemployment Laws 2020.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2020c. “Significant Provisions of State Unemployment Insurance Laws,” January 2020.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021a. UI Replacement Rates Report (online database). Accessed June 8, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021b. Unemployment Insurance Chartbook (online database), “Category 12 Regular Program Insured Unemployment as a Percent of Total Unemployment.” Accessed June 2, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021c. “Unemployment Insurance Extended Benefits” (web page), accessed May 14, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Office of Unemployment Insurance Division of Fiscal and Actuarial Services (U.S. DOL-OUI). 2021. State Unemployment Insurance Tax Measures Report 2020. April 2021.

U.S. General Accounting Office (U.S. GAO). 1993. GAO/HRD-93-107, Unemployment Insurance: Program’s Ability to Meet Objectives Jeopardized. Report to the Chairman, Senate Committee on Finance, U.S. Senate, September 1993.

Vermont Department of Labor (Vermont DOL). 2021. Quarterly Reporting & Taxable Wage Information (online database). Accessed May 21, 2021.

Vroman, Wayne, Elaine Maag, Christopher O’Leary, and Stephen Woodbury. 2017. A Comparative Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Financing Methods. Washington, D.C. Department of Labor, Chief Evaluation Office, prepared by the Urban Institute, December 2017.

Wentworth, George. 2017. Closing Doors on the Unemployed: Why Most Jobless Workers Are Not Receiving Unemployment Insurance and What States Can Do About It. National Employment Law Project, December 2017.

Woodbury, Stephen A. 2004. Layoffs and Experience Rating of the Unemployment Insurance Payroll Tax: Panel Data Analysis of Employers in Three States. October 2004.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

By Rebecca Dixon and William Spriggs

The unemployment insurance system is the country’s only automatic income support program for individuals who have lost work. It kicks in automatically when job losses start—without the delays and political and policy wrangling about if, when, or how to respond. The program serves as a key stabilizer during economic downturns by buttressing consumer spending, demand, and sentiment—preventing people’s fears of job loss from constricting private demand for spending on goods and services faster than the initial job losses.

As we saw these past 15 months, however, when so many businesses had to shut down to help stop the spread of COVID-19, the unemployment insurance program has big holes in who normally gets benefits. Faced with massive job losses, the program would have proven an insufficient automatic stabilizer because of its huge gaps in coverage. Thankfully, Congress acted quickly to plug (albeit temporarily) some of those holes, and unemployment insurance served as the primary vehicle to help people who lost work and were left with no income. Since the start of the pandemic, the program has injected hundreds of billions of dollars into the U.S. economy, keeping millions of families in their homes and out of poverty.1

Because unemployment insurance is a federal–state hybrid program, states have broad flexibility to determine eligibility and benefit levels. This has led to notable coverage variations across states. For example, southern states with large Black populations have among the lowest benefit payments.

The UI program’s shortcomings, laid bare by the pandemic, meant that the injection of income support was not automatic for the millions of workers locked out of the program by outdated eligibility rules; it was not automatic for people caught in their state’s “race to the bottom” to slash benefits. But when the scale of the pandemic’s unemployment crisis became clear, Congress had to step in, to supplement benefit amounts and expand the program temporarily to cover workers not normally eligible for benefits due to their nonemployee status or because they worked part time or for low wages.

In the wake of lessons learned from the pandemic, unemployed workers and their advocates are speaking up, organizing, and demanding long-term reforms to fundamentally transform the unemployment system. This report provides a brief history of race- and gender-based exclusions and analyzes the program’s coverage, performance, and revenue base, pinpointing gaps and offering a vision of a revamped UI system with minimum federal standards that will more effectively and expansively provide income support to unemployed workers while stabilizing the macroeconomy.

The unemployment insurance system was conceived during the Great Depression in the 1930s by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. As the program was created in the context of a broader system of patriarchy and racial hierarchy, Congress made compromises in its design that were laser-focused on protecting the earnings of white male breadwinners in manufacturing. Congress also compromised to give states huge discretion in implementing the program so they could have control to mirror their practices of racial exclusion. The program’s architects designed a system that attempted to reconcile opposing goals: to support the intended workers while excluding enough other workers to get it across the finish line in Congress. Federal unemployment insurance law has never meaningfully addressed those exclusions.

The composition of the U.S. workforce has shifted enormously since the 1930s. In just the past two decades, the United States lost about 4 million manufacturing jobs while gaining about 4 million food service jobs. In February 2020, there were roughly the same number of manufacturing workers as restaurant workers. But the unemployment insurance system, designed for full-time, higher-wage manufacturing workers, was never amended or adapted to industries where many workers are part time and are paid poverty wages. The almost 6 million payroll positions lost in March and April 2020 in food services was greater than the entire nondurable manufacturing workforce in February 2020 (BLS-CES 2021).

Clearly, the rules about who has access to unemployment insurance need to catch up to our racial and gender equity values and to the realities of working people and families today.

On the revenue side, the financing of the unemployment insurance system no longer matches the source of labor market collapses. In the 1930s, the state unemployment insurance systems on which the federal program was modeled taxed companies with an eye to swings in inventories. Manufacturers would hire workers when the economy expanded, guess wrong on the strength of growth, and then, when inventories piled up from weak sales, lay workers off.

Today, the companies that create excessive churn in the labor market (relying on low wages and high labor turnover rates) often do not pay more into the system, because workers under this style of low-road management—temporary, contract staffing, part-time, and low-paid workers—too often do not qualify for unemployment insurance. Since the 1980s, recessions have been more related to financial markets than inventory cycles, and they have been more severe than state unemployment trust funds were designed to handle. The disruptions are greater, causing more permanent job losses than cyclical temporary layoffs. The average duration of unemployment is trending upward, and it takes longer to return to previous peak employment levels (Freeman 2013). For Black workers who face systemic employment discrimination, the recovery is always longer.

Unfortunately, the system has no protection for workers in this “race to the bottom.” Women and Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and immigrant workers will bear the brunt of the pain unless we transform the system. Black and Latinx workers have lower recipiency rates than white workers, despite facing higher unemployment rates. Women have a lower recipiency rate than men, because they are more likely to work in low-paid, part-time dominated industries (Nichols and Simms 2012). Every severe downturn mars the early earnings history of young people, disrupts women’s labor force participation, and makes it harder to return to the labor market.2 Race, gender, and intergenerational equity fault lines in the unemployment insurance program must be addressed.

The politics around unemployment insurance are another nagging problem. Since 1980, with each new downturn drawing down state unemployment trust fund balances, conservative state lawmakers and policymakers have responded not by replenishing funds but by slashing eligibility and benefits. Already, as this report is being released, a conservative “revolt” has taken place, with half of states announcing plans to “secede” from the federal government’s expanded unemployment insurance programs. These misguided efforts will remove a half billion dollars a week from the nation’s economic recovery, while deepening inequities felt by workers of color and hurting families that need the aid to get by (Stettner 2021). Some of these states are now considering legislation to cut the duration of benefits and erect more barriers to benefits—further weakening the system and leaving those states ill-prepared for the next downturn.

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, Congress swiftly enacted changes to expand the program and improve eligibility and benefit sufficiency. Now the challenge is how to learn from those lessons and adopt permanent changes to strengthen the unemployment insurance system. The urgency of understanding the shortfalls and reforming the system are clear. U.S. payrolls remain down over 8 million jobs from their February 2020 peak (Gould 2021). Even if the economy generates a record-setting 1 million jobs each month until September, Labor Day will arrive with millions facing long-term unemployment and having exhausted their lifeline of unemployment benefits. Others will find themselves defined out of being eligible, as their low earnings and part-time status will not qualify them for benefits; but for the expiring Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, they would have had nothing. The withdrawal of support will complicate, if not halt, the economic recovery.

This report examines the problems that resulted in an unemployment benefit system that struggled to rise to the crisis we faced in 2020 and will struggle again as states end emergency benefits, and when federal pandemic unemployment provisions expire in September. In addition, this report proposes critical first steps on the road to systemic unemployment insurance reform—fixes that state legislatures and governors can enact to ensure equity and adequate standards regarding just financing, eligibility, duration of benefits, and benefit levels and amounts—so that no one is left behind.

The Biden-Harris administration has proposed significant reforms to the unemployment insurance system in its fiscal year 2022 budget. Congress must seize this opportunity to begin to fix a failed system before more workers—particularly women and workers of color and their families—are hit again with a potential double dip in the labor market. If these fixes are not implemented now, the race to the bottom that has already started will leave us with a wholly inadequate system for the next downturn. Now is the time to fix UI.

—Rebecca Dixon is executive director of the National Employment Law Project. William Spriggs is chief economist at the AFL-CIO and a professor in, and former chair of, the Department of Economics at Howard University.

Endnotes

1. According to a recent audit by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of the Inspector General, as of January 2, 2021, states had drawn down a total of $392 billion to pay UI benefits for the PUA, PEUC, and FPUC programs. See U.S. DOL-OIG 2021. According to researchers at the Economic Policy Institute, the UI expansions in the CARES Act and regular UI payments reduced the number of those in poverty by 7.2 million in June 2020. See Zipperer 2020.

2. Since the 2001 downturn, women’s labor force participation has been relatively flat at near 60% (not counting the sharp drop in this rate during the COVID-19 pandemic). It dropped during the Great Recession and never fully recovered for white women. See BLS CPS 2021.

References

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics (BLS-CES). 2021. “All Employees, Food Services and Drinking Places” [CES7072200001], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES7072200001, June 7, 2021; “All Employees, Manufacturing (MANEMP)” [CES3000000001], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP, June 7, 2021; and “All Employees, Nondurable Goods (NDMANEMP)” [CES3200000001], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NDMANEMP, June 7, 2021.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey (BLS-CPS). 2021. “Labor Force Participation Rate – 20 Yrs. & Over, White Women” [LNS11300029], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300029, June 7, 2021.

Freeman, Richard B. 2013. “Failing the Test? The Flexible U.S. Job Market in the Great Recession.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 19587, October 2013.

Gould, Elise. 2021. “The labor market is down 7.6 million jobs since February 2020, but the total jobs shortfall should take into account pre-pandemic labor market trends,” Twitter, @eliselgould, June 4, 2021, 9:02 a.m.

Nichols, Austin, and Margaret Simms. 2012. Racial and Ethnic Differences in Receipt of Unemployment Insurance Benefits During the Great Recession. Urban Institute, June 2012.

Stettner, Andrew. 2021. Fact Sheet: What’s at Stake as States Cancel Federal Unemployment Benefits. The Century Foundation, May 13, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Inspector General (DOL-OIG). 2021. COVID-19: States Struggled to Implement Cares Act Unemployment Insurance Programs, May 2021.

Zipperer, Ben. 2020. “Over 13 Million More People Would be in Poverty Without Unemployment Insurance and Stimulus Payments,” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), September 17, 2020.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

Key proposals

• Minimum standards: Establish federal minimum standards for which workers are eligible for unemployment insurance benefits, the minimum length of time benefits can last during regular economic times and during downturns, the share of lost wages replenished by UI benefits, and a weekly wage floor that benefits amounts cannot drop below.
• Tax penalties: Encourage the use of statutory tax penalties by allowing the federal government to apply incremental increases to the federal tax rate on employers in states that fail to meet minimum universal standards and other key obligations of a more equitable UI system.
• Noncompliance: Provide workers with a pathway to report state noncompliance to the federal government.
• Processing delays: Ensure that workers with pending applications that are not being processed in a timely way receive at least the minimum weekly benefit.

Introduction

The problem

The unemployment insurance system is a cornerstone of our economic infrastructure. It exists to support working people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own with cash benefits while steadying the economy during crises. But the UI system in many states now fundamentally fails in its core missions. Under the current system, the federal government sets certain basic ground rules, while states can fill in most of the details. State eligibility formulas exclude core groups of workers that include disproportionate shares of workers of color, such as low-wage workers, and women, such as part-time workers. Also unfairly left out are many gig workers who are misclassified as contractors and thus denied the benefits afforded only to employees in traditional employment relationships. It is up to states to determine whether workers and their employers have complied with state and federal rules, and many states lack effective tools for important tasks such as determining which employees are being misclassified as contractors.

States compete in a race to the bottom on UI taxes and, in times of economic distress, slash their way to replenishing depleted trust funds by shortening benefit duration and tightening eligibility. As a result, the once-standard, but by no means adequate, 26 weeks of benefits in normal economic times is eroding and some states offer just 12 weeks of benefits. Today, weekly benefits replace just about 40% of average wages, which is not nearly enough for workers, particular low-wage workers with families, to get by. These deteriorated standards are particularly harmful to Black workers. UI data show that states with high shares of Black workers tend to have lower UI recipiency rates—shares of unemployed workers who actually receive unemployment benefits—and lower average weekly UI benefits.

The solution

Require states to meet minimum federal standards for UI eligibility, duration of benefits, and benefit levels.

Implementation

To ensure that states meet minimum federal standards for UI eligibility, duration of benefits, and benefit levels, deploy carrots—assistance in the form of federal data collection enabling delivery of broader and better targeted benefits—but rely on sticks—incremental increases in tax rates for employers that fail to meet the minimum requirements, supported by mechanisms for workers to report state noncompliance.

Setting universal minimum guarantees across three big policy areas

Many of the problems we’ve diagnosed within the UI system are driven at least in part by large structural choices that the designers of the program made when it launched in the 1930s. In the long run, a sustainable UI program for the 21st century may require fundamental rethinking of those choices. Given the political reality that interest in UI reform peaks in the wake of an economic crises and ebbs thereafter, failure to pursue major revisions now—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic—risks squandering a rare opportunity. Our effort here therefore aims at the most urgently needed repairs.

Policy proposal: Enact a federal law establishing universal minimum guarantees across three key big policy areas: eligibility for benefits, duration of benefits, and benefit levels

To roll back the states’ race to the bottom, and guard against further erosion, we propose that federal law establish universal minimum guarantees across three key big policy areas: eligibility for benefits, duration of benefits, and benefit levels. States that wanted to establish more robust or more expansive benefits than the minimum guarantee could still do so. Guaranteeing universal minimum standards nationwide will make the system easier to navigate, and make it easier for workers to understand their eligibility.

Ensuring that states meet the minimum requirements

To ensure that states can afford to deliver on these guarantees, we propose a set of financing reforms—fair, efficient taxes that strongly encourage employers to be good partners with workforce agencies in administering the system.

Foremost, we propose requirements with real consequences for falling short, not just incentives, because recent efforts to gently nudge states to modernize have not resulted in meaningful or lasting changes. For example, although federal changes in the wake of the Great Recession sought to encourage states to extend benefits to part-time workers, and states did make some technical changes on that front, “monetary eligibility” rules still effectively bar many part-timers from collecting any UI benefits. In the current political environment, in which some states are outright refusing to deliver even benefits fully paid for with federal dollars (Stettner 2021), we doubt that meaningful reforms can be achieved with the kinds of modest carrots and unthreatening sticks previously on offer (Galle 2019).

Instead, we would update and expand the list of obligations states must meet in order for their businesses to qualify for low federal unemployment taxes, and give the Department of Labor more flexibility to set federal tax rates.

Policy proposal: Allow the federal government to apply incremental increases to the federal tax rate on employers in states that fail to meet minimum universal standards and other key obligations

The federal tax rate, the Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) rate, is 0.6%, but this rate rises tenfold to 6.0% if a state fails to meet its statutory obligations. This penalty is so large, however, that the Department of Labor has never been willing to impose it. Decades ago, Congress wrestled with a similar problem with the charitable contribution deduction: Because revocation of a charity’s eligibility to receive deductible donations was effectively a “death sentence,” the IRS very rarely imposed it, even in situations where individuals were exploiting charitable resources for their own use (Manny 2007). In response, in 1998 Congress enacted a system of “intermediate sanctions,” under which the IRS is empowered to impose much smaller penalty taxes on organization managers. We would similarly recommend that Congress authorize the Department of Labor to increase the federal tax rate on employers in small increments within the range between 0.6% and 6.0%, depending on the degree of state noncompliance. Certain minimum penalties for clear breaches of federal guarantees, such as for potential benefit duration of less than the federal minimum, should be set by statute.

Providing workers with a voice and options when universal standards are not met

Intermediate sanctions might help ensure state consistency with universal guarantees in the long run, but additional measures are needed to provide workers with a voice in ensuring that universal guarantees are met and to hold them harmless when they are not. Even an expanded sanctions regime depends on Department of Labor willingness to use it. Under current administrative law doctrine, agencies can foil most enforcement regimes by refusing to initiate action (Barkow 2016). Private parties often have no avenue for judicial recourse to challenge agency inaction (Metzger 2015).

Policy proposal: Provide workers with a pathway to report state noncompliance to the federal government

Workers should have a pathway to report state noncompliance to the federal government. We therefore propose that the sanctions statute include opportunities for the public, including labor organizations and other community groups, to petition the Department of Labor to initiate a sanctions action, patterned on existing administrative law procedures that allow private parties to petition for rulemaking (CRS 2020). As in the petition for rulemaking process, DOL would be obligated to respond to nonfrivolous petitions, and if it chooses not to take action, it must explain why not. A decision not to impose sanctions would be reviewable in court as “final agency action.” Petitioners would be entitled to recover costs and attorneys’ fees for nonfrivolous petitions and court challenges.

Policy proposal: Ensure that workers with pending applications that are not being processed in a timely way receive at least the minimum weekly benefit

In states that fail to deliver guaranteed benefits in a timely way, workers should be entitled to at least the minimum weekly benefit while their application is pending. As explained in Section 5, the benefit levels section of the report, the minimum benefit in normal economic times is the greater of $250 or 30% of the state’s average weekly wage, and in downturns the greater of $300 per week or 40% of the state’s average weekly wage.

Benefit lapses leave mother scrambling to pay bills

Amy Cabrera-Cabello, Arizona

I am a single mother trying to put my son through college and then medical school. I was working at the largest provider of meeting and travel services in the world, until COVID. After taxes my state benefits are a little over $200 a week. I am not sure how that little bit of money is supposed to help the average worker.

Then [after receiving benefits for a while] things got worse. On December 26, 2020, I didn’t receive a check. I called and after waiting on hold for two hours, spoke to a woman who was convinced [the missed check] was due to Trump signing the relief bill late. I continued calling, often waiting on hold for hours. I was told to file an extension, but that the system was so backed up it could take 11 weeks.

After more than two months, I received some payments, but on March 20th they stopped again. I was told to file for another extension. I can barely pay my bills on the little benefits in Arizona. Not getting it at all, and having this happen frequently, is even more nerve-wracking.

Enacting universal guarantees as a path to bigger reforms

Not all the signatories think these steps go far enough to solve unemployment insurance’s deep-seated challenges. We all agree, though, that the universal guarantees we propose below are major improvements over the status quo, may help to set UI on a path to bigger reforms, and are well worth pursuing in their own right.

References

Barkow, Rachel. 2016. “Overseeing Agency Enforcement.” George Washington Law Review 84: 1129–1186.

Congressional Research Service (CRS). 2020. Petitions for Rulemaking: An Overview, CRS Report R46190, January 2020.

Galle, Brian. 2019. “How to Save Unemployment Insurance.” Arizona State Law Journal 50: 1009–1064.

Manny, Jill. 2007. “Nonprofit Payments to Insiders and Outsiders: Is the Sky the Limit?” Fordham Law Review 76: 735–763.

Metzger, Gillian. 2015. “The Constitutional Duty to Supervise.” Yale Law Journal 124: 1836–1933.

Stettner, Andrew. 2021. “Fact Sheet: What’s at Stake As States Cancel Federal Unemployment Benefits.” The Century Foundation, May 13, 2021.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

Unemployment insurance (UI) is a pillar of the social safety net. During normal economic times, UI helps families to protect against unexpected drops in income. In recessions, it takes on an added role as economic booster, helping to maintain spending against the downward spiral that is typical of most downturns. It was introduced as a national policy in the United States in the wake of the Great Depression, after several states had tried and largely failed to establish their own programs.

The core aspects of UI haven’t changed much since 1937. In essence, UI is a government program jointly funded by states and the federal government, and mostly administered by states. The federal government sets certain basic ground rules, while states can fill in most of the details. States also determine whether workers and their employers have complied with state and federal rules.

UI provides a partial replacement of wages for some recently unemployed workers. A worker who is fired, or is forced by certain compelling circumstances to leave, can claim benefits, while workers who quit voluntarily usually cannot. Eligible workers must submit a claim to a local unemployment office, and in most cases must show the office that they are available for and seeking a replacement job. Claimants also must meet “monetary eligibility” targets, meaning that they must show that they earned some minimum amount in the year or so before submitting their claim. This rule makes lower-earning part-time workers effectively ineligible for UI in many states. Self-employed individuals, such as those who work as contractors rather than employees, are also usually ineligible, although in 2020 a special program (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or “PUA”) enacted by Congress as part of the CARES Act in response to the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily granted benefits to these workers.

The fraction of separated workers (unemployed, for any reason) who receive benefits from the regular (i.e., nonemergency programs) is known as the “recipiency rate.” Because states vary so widely in their rules, so too do their recipiency rates. In 2019, although the national average was 28%, New Jersey topped the nation at 59%, while in many states fewer than one in six separated workers got any UI at all. Florida was lowest, at 11% (U.S. DOL-ETA 2021b). The recipiency rate in the United States is far below average for the rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2018).

If a worker is found eligible, she is paid a fraction of her old wages, known as the “replacement rate,” up to a statutory dollar-value cap. Both this fraction and the cap are set by states. At the end of 2019, weekly benefits averaged $371 nationwide; before tax this represented a replacement of about 38% of the average wage (U.S. DOL-ETA 2021a). Again, the United States replaces a much smaller fraction of worker wages than many of its rich country peers in the OECD, and the U.S. replacement rate is below the OECD average (OECD 2021b).

Workers can only claim benefits for a limited period, 26 weeks in most states, although since 2010 at least 10 states have cut their benefit duration (some to as short as 12 weeks). Federal law requires states to also offer extended benefits (EB) for an additional period when certain adverse economic conditions are met. And Congress enacted additional, temporary, extensions in 2009 and 2020.

Both state and federal governments impose taxes to pay for the UI system. In both cases, UI taxes are nominally imposed on employers, but economists believe that in the long run employers pass some of the cost of these taxes on to workers in the form of lower salaries. The federal government collects state and federal taxes and holds each state’s proceeds in a trust fund account. Federal law encourages states to require that employers are “experience rated,” so that employers whose workers file more successful claims pay a higher rate of tax.1 Firms with very high experience-rated tax rates relative to their industry are less likely to be able to pass through these taxes to workers, which means that experience rating creates real incentives for firms to either reduce turnover or find ways to deny benefits to workers (see Section 2. Financing).

State revenues pay for benefits, while the federal revenues fund grants to cover most of the direct costs of UI administration. States also must pay 50% of the cost of extended benefits when those are active, but in recent recessions the federal government has covered 100% of those expenses, as well as the full cost of the emergency extensions.

Additional details on UI finances, eligibility, benefit levels, and benefit duration

We now offer additional detail for readers who may be interested in particulars, with the summary of federal rules drawn primarily from 26 U.S. Code Chapter 23—Federal Unemployment Tax Act (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/subtitle-C/chapter-23) and state rules based largely on the U.S. Department of Labor’s “Significant Provisions of State Unemployment Insurance Laws” (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020b). In the current UI system, most rules are set individually by states. Although federal law imposes a handful of rules, the main influence of federal law on states is by way of the tax system and other financial incentives. We therefore begin with some added information about how UI is funded.

Finances

The taxable wage base. States and the federal government both collect unemployment taxes from employers on the “taxable wage base.” Each employer pays a tax on each dollar of wages paid to employees, up to a cap. The portion of wages under the cap is the wage base. For example, the federal tax is imposed only on the first $7,000 of wages paid to each employee. The wage base on which the state tax is imposed cannot be lower than the federal wage base but can be higher, and state wage bases today range from $7,000 to about $53,000, with the majority under $15,000.

The federal tax rate. Federal taxes are usually 0.6%, but only if a state is in compliance with federal requirements. If the U.S. Department of Labor were to find a state out of compliance, the tax rate would increase by a factor of 10, to 6%. To our knowledge no state has ever triggered this penalty; the list of requirements is short and DOL has little discretion to reject state rules. Thus, the current federal tax is $42 per worker annually: 0.6% times the wage base of $7,000.

The state tax rate. An employer’s total state tax payment per worker depends not only on the wage base but also on the applicable tax rate, which can vary from employer to employer. Employers with more worker turnover pay higher rates, a practice known as “experience rating.” The total payment per employee is just the product of the employer’s rate times the wage base. In Missouri, a fairly low-tax state, the average employer would pay to the state a 1% tax on the state wage base of $11,500, for a state tax total of $115 per worker. Nationwide in 2020, the total average state UI tax was about $277 per worker, a decrease from an average of $350 over the 2013 to 2018 period (U.S. DOL-OUI 2021; BLS 2020).

State trust funds. Because UI expenditures usually exceed revenues during recessions, states are required to maintain a “trust fund” account with the federal government. State tax revenues are deposited in the trust fund and then state benefits are paid out of the fund. States that run out of money can borrow from the federal government, although these debts must usually be repaid fairly quickly and at relatively high rates. States that maintain a high enough balance in their accounts can qualify for a very short period of interest-free borrowing.

Federal grants for administration and operations. Federal revenues are used mostly to pay for state administration of the UI program. The U.S. Department of Labor makes annual grants to states out of the federal unemployment insurance trust fund to cover personnel and other expenses, and it has some limited discretion to impose conditions on these grants. States also receive money under other federal grant programs for operations related to UI, such as funding for job centers that may serve to connect individuals to UI.

Eligibility for benefits

States impose both initial and continuing requirements for receiving UI benefits. Initial requirements are usually subdivided into two categories, “monetary” and “nonmonetary” requirements. Each week after receiving initial benefits, workers must typically also establish that they are “able and available” for work.

Monetary requirements for initial benefits. Monetary requirements are intended to establish that the individual is already attached to the workforce—that is, that they are experiencing a temporary interruption in earnings, not permanent unemployment. Typically, applicants must show that they have earned some minimum amount of wages in the year to year and half prior to their application. This testing period is known as the “base period,” and in most states is the first four of the five most recent completed quarters prior to application; some states are more flexible for some applicants (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020b).

Determining the minimum total wage that has to be earned during the base period is complex and varies widely from state to state. For instance, in Connecticut all that is needed is the greater of $600 or 40 times the worker’s weekly benefit amount over the base period. Next door in New York, a worker must have earned at least $2,400 in one of the base period quarters, and $3,600 overall. As a practical matter, some part-time workers are effectively disqualified from UI in states with higher minimums, such as Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, and New York.

Nonmonetary requirements for initial benefits. In addition to needing to meet these dollar thresholds, separated workers also must show that they left work for the right reasons, usually known as the “nonmonetary” requirement. Like other insurance, UI programs attempt to limit an insured’s ability to control when they receive payment, and this is the primary function of nonmonetary rules. While states vary considerably, for the most part workers cannot claim benefits if they left a job voluntarily, unless they can establish a compelling and relatively involuntary reason for their departure. Many workers lose benefits on these grounds, with nonmonetary denials averaging more than 1.2 million per year nationally (U.S. DOL-ETA 2021c).

Continuing requirements. Lastly, even after satisfying these initial hurdles workers must also establish, on a weekly or biweekly basis, that they are searching for work and available to accept a job. In most states an individual who is only able to accept part-time work is not considered “available for work” unless that worker qualified for UI benefits with part-time hours (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020a).

Together, these rules create several notable gaps in who is able to depend on UI. Self-employed individuals, including workers who in reality are employees but have been misclassified by their employer as contractors, cannot claim UI because they lack qualifying wages. Part-time workers, as we’ve noted, often fail monetary eligibility and may also be unable to establish that they are available for work. Most noncitizens without work authorization are denied benefits by federal law, although the exact boundaries of that prohibition are contested. Those who are just entering the workforce or rejoining after an extended interruption, such as mothers or recently incarcerated individuals, also cannot meet monetary eligibility standards (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020a).

Benefit levels

For the most part, states are free to decide what benefits to provide to eligible UI claimants. Key factors that determine a worker’s benefits are the share of pretax wages paid, also known as the “replacement rate,” as well as minimum and maximum weekly benefit amounts. Net benefit amounts are also affected by state and federal government policies on whether UI benefits are taxed.

State formulas for determining weekly benefits are complex and vary considerably from state to state. A plurality approach is to compute the worker’s highest quarterly wage during the base period (again, the base period is usually the four quarters preceding the most recent completed quarter). Among these states, many of them award workers one-half of their average weekly wage during that highest-wage quarter. Beneficiaries always get at least a minimum weekly benefit, with the median state offering around $50 (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020b).

Weekly benefits are capped, usually at some multiple of the average weekly wage for all workers in the state. In 2020, there were six states (Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee) where the maximum weekly benefit was less than $300; in Mississippi it was just $235. A few states additionally grant a small allowance for each dependent, which also can increase the maximum benefit amount. For example, in 2020 the maximum benefit for any household, including the dependent allowance, was the $1,234 allotted in Massachusetts.

In general, a worker who is receiving benefits loses them when returning to work. To encourage part-time work among benefit recipients, most states allow a small amount of part-time earnings in addition to UI. Any earnings above this amount then reduce benefits dollar for dollar: effectively, a 100% marginal tax rate. A typical earnings disregard is 20% to 25% of the weekly benefit amount (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020b). So, for instance, with a disregard of 20%, a worker receiving $200 per week in benefits could earn up to $40 in added wages without reducing their benefits, but then a worker who earned $50 would get only $190 in benefits.

Unemployment insurance benefits are included in federal taxable income for income tax purposes, but are not subject to the Social Security payroll tax (Congress also exempted the first $10,200 of 2020 UI benefits from tax for lower-earning households). Most states follow federal law with respect to taxation of UI benefits, although California and Pennsylvania both expressly exempt UI benefits from state taxable income (Galle, Pancotti, and Stettner 2021; Pennsylvania Office of Unemployment Compensation 2021).

Taxation affects the net replacement rate. Suppose a worker is in the 10% federal tax bracket. If their pretax wages are $10,000, they take home $9,000. Suppose the state intends to provide workers with a net replacement rate of 50%. If UI benefits are not federally taxed, the state can offer a UI benefit of $4,500: that is the amount that leaves workers with 50% of their working (net) wages. In contrast, if UI benefits are subject to federal tax, the state must pay a benefit of $5,000, resulting in the same $4,500 in benefits received after tax. For any given replacement rate target, the state must pay more (and impose higher UI tax rates) when UI benefits are subject to federal tax.

Benefit duration

As with the weekly benefit amount, states have almost complete control over the duration of ordinary UI benefits. Traditionally, states offered a maximum of 26 weeks, a figure that is among the lowest in the developed world. Again the United States lags far behind its OECD peers, many of which offer up to two years or more (OECD 2021a). Further, since 2009, many states have reduced maximum benefit durations further, in a couple of cases to as few as 12 weeks of benefits.2 Massachusetts currently has the longest potential benefit duration, topping out at 30 weeks for some beneficiaries.

As described briefly above, the federal Extended Benefits program, or EB, mandates additional weeks of benefits, and these benefits are triggered automatically by economic conditions. The EB program provides two tiers of extended potential benefit durations: tier 1 adds 13 weeks and tier 2 adds an additional 7 weeks. The triggers for tier 1 are based on the level and/or the change in the insured unemployment rate (IUR)—a measure of how many in the labor force are currently receiving UI benefits.3 This measure can obviously vary by labor market conditions, but also can vary based on state-level eligibility criteria. That is, in states where it is hard to qualify for UI benefits, the state is less likely to hit the IUR trigger. States can opt to use another trigger that is a much more focused measure of labor market distress: the total unemployment rate (TUR), which is simply the official unemployment rate, a measure that includes workers who are unemployed but not receiving UI benefits.4

The EB program is also designed to automatically trigger off benefits when economic conditions improve or do not worsen. Once the trigger on criteria are no longer met, EB is turned off. In addition, an EB “look-back” provision triggers benefits off whenever there has been no significant increase in unemployment over the past two years. Persistently high unemployment does not prevent the EB benefits from triggering off.

Endnotes

1. 26 U.S. Code § 3303

2. In some cases states do not directly determine how long benefits will last, but instead first calculate a total benefit amount and weekly benefit amount, both based on wages during the base period. For example, if the total benefit were $10,000 and the weekly amount were $500, the household would have 20 weeks of benefits.

3. The IUR trigger is 5% plus 20% above the average level in the same quarters of the two previous years, or optionally a flat 6% IUR. Most states and the District of Columbia using the IUR trigger use the optional 6% trigger.

4. At press, 19 states used the TUR trigger, which is 6.5% and a 10% increase over the same quarter of either of the previous two years.

References

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2020. “The Cost of Layoffs in Unemployment Insurance Taxes.” Monthly Labor Review. April 2020.

Galle, Brian, Elizabeth Pancotti, and Andrew Stettner. 2021. “Expert Q&A About the Unemployment Provisions of the American Rescue Plan.” The Century Foundation, March 10, 2021.

Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). 2018. “Pseudo-coverage Rates of Unemployment Benefits.” Social Benefit Recipients (SOCR) Annual Data by Country. Pooled 2007–2018 data, accessed June 8, 2021.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2021a. “Comparative Policy Tables 2020” (online database), OECD Tax-Benefit Data Portal, accessed 2021.

Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). 2021b. “Net Replacement Rate in Unemployment” (online table). In OECD.Stat (database), accessed 2021.

Pennsylvania Office of Unemployment Compensation. 2021. “Taxes on Benefits.” Accessed May 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2020a. “Monetary Entitlement” and “Nonmonetary Eligibility.” In Comparison of State UI Laws. Accessed June 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2020b. “Significant Provisions of State Unemployment Insurance Laws.” July 2020.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021a. UI Replacement Rates Report (online database), fourth quarter 2019 data accessed June 8, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021b. Unemployment Insurance Chartbook (online database), “Category 13: Recipiency Rates by State.” Accessed June 8, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021c. Unemployment Insurance (UI) Nonmonetary Determinations [downloadable data sets]; summing 2019 quarterly figures from the “UI Nonmonetary Determinations” and column in spreadsheet for separation denials. Updated April 1, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Office of Unemployment Insurance (U.S. DOL-OUI). 2021. State Unemployment Insurance: Tax Measures Report 2020. April 2021.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

The economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic has shined a bright light on the nation’s unemployment insurance system. It has not been a pretty sight. Swamped by the sudden, massive influx of claims in March of 2020, many state UI programs faltered. Computer systems crashed and telephone helplines were perpetually busy. The problems persisted. By the fall, reports were widespread of people in need often waiting weeks—or months—for their benefits (Long and Fowers 2020; Zakrzewski and Riley 2020; Moss 2020; Iacurci 2020).

As state UI structures shook from the initial jolt, federal policymakers realized that benefit levels were too low and not available to enough workers. In part to offer stimulus to a sharply contracting economy, the federal government provided unemployed workers claiming standard UI benefits with a supplemental $600 per week in additional benefits. These Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (PUC) program benefits—enacted as part of the CARES Act—were hugely important to millions of Americans in need.

Also critical were two other temporary UI programs created by the CARES Act: Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which extended the duration of benefits, and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which provided benefits to some groups of workers left out of the regular UI system, such as the self-employed and temporary workers. Workers eligible for PUA were also eligible for the $600 weekly supplement. The PUA program brought sustained help to a broader swath of the U.S. workforce: As of March 2021, about 7.5 million workers who otherwise would have been without benefits were receiving them under the program (NELP 2020; Picchi 2020; U.S. DOL-ETA 2021c).

But there were problems. In addition to the delays in processing benefits, weaknesses of some of the state UI systems drew the attention of organized criminal enterprises, which engaged in identity theft and other forms of fraud to steal funds. Well-publicized cases of fraud led to measures that slowed the delivery of benefits to legitimate applicants in some states (Cohen 2020; Holzhauer 2020).

These problems were not simply the result of a once-in-a-century pandemic. If they were, perhaps the country could move on under the assumption that better public health measures would avoid future recurrences. Instead, significant underlying issues with the nation’s UI system were exposed by the stress of the pandemic-driven economic jolt. Under pressure, the system gave way in places where it was already broken (McDermott 2020; Adamczyk 2020).

The idea that the UI system needs an overhaul is not new. It is a product of the New Deal—and its design still bears the influences of that era and the decades immediately following. The eligibility standards for workers to qualify for aid—and the level and duration of the help they receive—remain rooted in outdated images of typical UI claimants as male factory workers whose plants have temporarily shut during a recession.

The notion of the economy these standards reflect is also obsolete, one where labor markets recover very quickly after recessions hit, and workers return to their old jobs. In that economy, beneficiaries would need aid for a few months until the nation recovers and the plant reopens. Like the 1950s image of the economy this reflects, the UI system marginalizes many women and workers of color, leaving too many of them without aid, or with much too little aid, when they lose jobs through no fault of their own (West et al. 2016; Edwards 2020; Kofman and Fresques 2020).

The UI system has failed to keep up with the modern economy

The American economy of today is not the economy UI was built for. The temporary shifts of the pandemic economy notwithstanding, more women are in the labor force. Factories that close often never reopen (at least in this country). Part-time work has grown as a share of the labor market since the mid-1950s (when data on part-time employment began to be collected). And online platform work and other emerging forms of employment arrangements are capturing a great deal of policy and media attention (BLS 2018, 2021a; Congdon and Vroman 2021).

Yet relatively little has been done to update the rules of the UI system to capture these shifts. As a result, the share of unemployed workers who actually receive UI benefits had fallen below 3 in 10 before the pandemic, down from closer to 4 in 10 (36%) in 2007 before the Great Recession (U.S. DOL-ETA 2021a). And as this report will show, workers whose lives are already the most financially precarious—disproportionately workers of color, women, and individuals with disabilities —are the most likely to be left out by exclusionary eligibility rules (Tucker and Vogtman 2020; Bhutta et al. 2020; Gould and Wilson 2020; Gould, Perez, and Wilson 2020; BLS 2019).

One reason for the failure to modernize the UI system is that federal policymakers tend to focus on UI only during economic downturns, legislating additional weeks of federally funded aid to address the immediate distress but doing little to reform the system as a whole.

Another less obvious factor is likely the growing influence of corporate power and capital in our politics and economy. The share of private-sector workers in unions is down to about 6%, making it easier for employers to keep wealth they create for themselves and shareholders. The tilting of the economic playing field toward the wealthy and capital likely has a number of reasons, including changes in tax, antitrust, and trade policy as well as global economic shifts (Piketty 2017). But the effect in the U.S. is clear and not favorable to workers. The labor share of national income has been calculated to have declined from 65% to 57% from 1980 to 2012 (BLS 2021b; Farber et al. 2020; Clausing 2017).

The UI system in many states now fundamentally fails in its core missions

The deepening inequality is reflected in a UI system that in many states now fundamentally fails in its core missions. As Rebecca Dixon and William Spriggs explain in the Introduction, families need unemployment insurance to get them through temporary rough spells, and UI is one of the government’s most effective policies for fighting recessions. Yet states keep cutting and cutting. Particularly in states with histories of weak labor movements (which often overlap with those that have the most troubled racial history), UI benefits are now among the shortest, and reach the lowest shares of unemployed workers, of anywhere in the developed world. As of 2019 there were 10 states offering fewer than 26 weeks of benefits (two offering as few as 12 weeks of benefits), and in several of those states fewer than one in six workers were able to claim even that short span of benefits. Right before the pandemic (in January 2020), weekly benefits were replacing less than half of average wages, and in some states benefits topped out at less than $275 per week—equivalent to less than a $7 hourly wage. If that is even still a net, there is no safety in it (U.S. DOL-ETA 2020, 2021b; OECD 2021a, 2021b; CRS 2019).

Even these dismal numbers fail to capture the struggles of workers largely left on the margins of the American economy, and who are equally excluded by an assortment of technical but crucial UI rules. In many of these groups, workers of color and women are overrepresented, as noted in the Eligibility section of this report.

Too many workers fall through the cracks

Part-time workers, who are especially likely to be working women and individuals with disabilities, fall through the cracks of UI in most places. The obstacles to their claiming benefits are myriad: requirements to earn a certain level of wages over a short period; rules obligating beneficiaries to be seeking full-time employment; limits on the reasons a worker can leave a job; and loopholes that deny benefits for workers affiliated with staffing agencies, among others. The lack of UI coverage for lower-earning part-time workers also harms Black and Latinx workers, who are a disproportionate share of people working part time because they can’t get the full-time hours they want (BLS 2020; IWPR 2016; Golden and Kim 2020).

And, until the temporary Pandemic Unemployment Assistance experiment in 2020, UI offered no help at all for “gig” workers and millions of other workers around the country misclassified by their employers as contractors. Because UI taxes are imposed on wages, employers are incentivized to treat their workers as contractors, at least for legal purposes, and whole industries arguably are built on this kind of arbitrage. This treatment leaves the affected worker with no available benefit when they experience a work interruption. Black workers are more likely than other workers to be temporary help agency workers, and Asian workers are more likely than other workers to work for contract firms (Kosanovich 2018). Finally, genuine small-business entrepreneurs who might respond to financial setbacks by trying to enter the workforce, and who might benefit from some transitional funding, have no recourse.

States compete in a race to the bottom

It is not our goal here to resolve all of the deep structural challenges that have steered the nation’s unemployment insurance system to these straits. But some of the more immediate drivers are created by poor design of UI’s finances. As we explain in the report, regular state UI benefits and a portion of extended benefits in downturns are funded through state taxes on corporations. And states compete in a race to the bottom in UI taxes just as globally there is a race to the bottom for corporate taxes generally. The pressure to keep UI taxes low contributes to a climate in which states with depleted UI coffers slash their way to budget balance by shortening the duration of benefits, tightening eligibility, and (less visibly, but no less damagingly) underinvesting in UI system infrastructure. Further, nearly all states impose higher tax rates on businesses with higher shares of former workers claiming UI benefits. Evidence strongly suggests that this rule encourages employers to make it harder for separated workers to get the benefits they are due.

An opportunity to make needed repairs

The spotlight shining on the UI system provides a rare opportunity to make needed repairs to bring the system into the 21st century. UI reform is not just a set of technical fixes, but in a real and immediate sense is racial justice, is gender justice. And a UI system that is reformed to reflect both the current economy and the current workforce would not only strengthen the economy but also promote genuine economic opportunity for all.

References

Adamczyk, Alicia. 2020. “The U.S. Unemployment System Was Already Broken. Then the Coronavirus Pandemic Hit.” CNBC, October 8, 2020.

Bhutta, Neil, Andrew C. Chang, Lisa J. Dettling, and Joanne W. Hsu. 2020. “Disparities in Wealth by Race and Ethnicity in the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances.” FEDS Notes. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, September 28, 2020.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2018. Women in the Labor Force: a Databook. BLS Reports. December 2018.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2019. Characteristics of Unemployment Insurance Applicants and Benefit Recipients (economic news release) “Table 1: Unemployment Insurance (UI) Benefit Applicants and Recipients among Unemployed Persons Who Had Worked in the Past 12 Months by Selected Characteristics, 2018.” Last modified November 7, 2019.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2020. “Persons with a Disability: Labor Force Characteristics—2020” (news release). February 24, 2021.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2021a. Current Population Survey data. Employment Level–Part-Time for Economic Reasons, Nonagricultural Industries [LNS12032197]; Employment Level–Part-Time for Noneconomic Reasons, Nonagricultural Industries [LNS12032200]; Employment Level–Nonagricultural Industries [LNS12035019], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org, June 11, 2021.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2021b. “Union Members Summary” (news release). January 22, 2021.

Clausing, Kimberly. 2017. “Labor and Capital in the Global Economy.” Democracy A Journal of Ideas no. 43, Winter 2017.

Cohen, Patricia. 2020. “Fraud Schemes Exploit Weak Spots in Unemployment Claims System.” New York Times, October 1, 2020.

Congdon, William J., and Wayne Vroman. 2021. Covering More Workers with Unemployment Insurance: Lessons from the Great Recession. Urban Institute, February 2021.

Congressional Research Service (CRS). 2019. Unemployment Insurance: Consequences of Changes in State Unemployment Compensation Laws. R41859, updated October 23, 2019.

Edwards, Kathryn. 2020. “The Racial Disparity in Unemployment Benefits.” The RAND Blog, July 15, 2020.

Farber, Henry S., Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu. 2020. Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data. October 9, 2020.

Golden, Lonnie, and Jaeseung Kim. 2020. Underemployment Just Isn’t for U.S. Part-Time Workers. CLASP, May 2020.

Gould, Elise, and Valerie Wilson. 2020. Black Workers Face Two of the Most Lethal Preexisting Conditions for Coronavirus—Racism and Economic Inequality. Economic Policy Institute, June 2020.

Gould, Elise, Daniel Perez, and Valerie Wilson. 2020. Latinx Workers—Particularly Women—Face Devastating Job Losses in the COVID-19 Recession. Economic Policy Institute, August 2020.

Holzhauer, Brett. 2020. “Unemployment Benefits Fraud: What to Know and How to Protect Yourself.” Forbes, October 9, 2020.

Iacurci, Greg. 2020. “The ‘Black Hole’ of Unemployment Benefits: Six Months Into the Pandemic, Some are Still Waiting for Aid.” CNBC, September 27, 2020.

Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). 2016. Pathways to Equity: Narrowing the Wage Gap by Improving Women’s Access to Good Middle-Skill Jobs. March 2016.

Kofman, Ava, and Hannah Fresques. 2020. “Black Workers Are More Likely to Be Unemployed but Less Likely to Get Unemployment Benefits.” ProPublica. August 24, 2020.

Kosanovich, Karen. 2018. “Workers in Alternative Employment Arrangements.” Spotlight on Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics. November 2018.

Long, Heather, and Alyssa Fowers. 2020. “A Record 3.3 Million Americans Filed for Unemployment Benefits as the Coronavirus Slams Economy.” Washington Post, March 26, 2020.

McDermott, Brendan. 2020. “Fix the Flaws COVID-19 Has Exposed in the Unemployment System.” Progressive Policy Institute. April 3, 2020.

Moss, Rebecca. 2020. “Laid Off Workers Battle Outages, Jammed Phone Lines as Pa. Unemployment System Buckles From Coronavirus Surge.” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 31, 2020.

National Employment Law Project (NELP). 2020. “Unemployment Insurance Provisions in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act” (fact sheet). March 2020.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2021a. Comparative Policy Tables 2020 online database, OECD Tax-Benefit Data Portal, accessed May 2021.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2021b. Social Benefit Recipients (SOCR) Database, Annual Data by Country (online database). Accessed June 2021.

Picchi, Aimee. 2020. “Extra $600 in Unemployment Benefits Ends: ‘It’s an Impossible Situation.’” CBS News, July 31, 2020.

Piketty, Thomas. 2017. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Tucker, Jasmine, and Julie Vogtman. 2020. When Hard Work is Not Enough: Women in Low-Paid Jobs. National Women’s Law Center, April 2020.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2020. “Table 3-12: Duration of Benefits.” In Comparison of State Unemployment Laws 2020.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021a. Unemployment Insurance Chartbook (online database), “Category 12 Regular Program Insured Unemployment as a Percent of Total Unemployment.” Accessed June 2, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021b. Unemployment Insurance Chartbook (Online database), “Category 13 Recipiency Rates, by State.” Accessed June 2, 2021.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021c. “Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims” (press release). April 1, 2021.

West, Rachel, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Kali Grant, Melissa Boteach, Claire McKenna, and Judy Conti. 2016. Strengthening Unemployment Protections in America: Modernizing Unemployment Insurance and Establishing a Jobseeker’s Allowance. Center for American Progress, June 2016.

Zakrzewski, Cat, and Tonya Riley. 2020. “The Technology 202: State Unemployment Websites are Crashing Amid Record Number of Claims.” Washington Post, April 2, 2020.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

Key proposals

• Wage replacement rates: Increase replacement rates to levels that truly alleviate severe economic hardship, particularly for low-wage workers, with a progressive formula that replaces at least 85% of wages for the lowest earners and gradually decreases to replace 50% of wages for higher earners, 30% of wages for very high earners, and so on.
• Dependent allowance: Help alleviate food and housing insecurity when parents or caregivers lose a job by providing a minimum dependent allowance of $35 (inflation adjusted) per dependent per week.
• Subminimum wage earners and tipped workers: Treat subminimum wage earners fairly by calculating benefit amounts based on what they should have earned if they were paid the prevailing minimum wage or, for tipped workers, wages with tips, whichever is greater.
• Part-time workers: Support rather than discourage part-time work as a bridge back to employment by implementing an earnings disregard that keeps part-timers’ UI benefits, combined with their part-time earnings, from falling short of their pre-layoff average weekly wage.
• New entrants and reentrants: Support job seekers who are newly entering or reentering the labor market with an allowance of $200 per week or 20% of the state’s average weekly wage, whichever is greater.
• Economic downturns: Make unemployment benefits a more powerful tool for recovery by increasing wage replacement rates, minimum and maximum benefit amounts, the dependent allowance, and the jobseeker’s allowance when extended benefits are triggered on:
  • 100% replacement for lowest-tier earnings and 65% of wages for highest-tier earnings
  • Minimum benefit the greater of $300 per week or 40% of the state’s average weekly wage (up from the greater of $250 or 30%)
• Taxation of benefits: Increase UI take-up and get more UI benefits recirculating as spending in the economy by fully exempting households with less than $100,000 in adjusted gross income from federal taxation of UI benefits.

Introduction

The problem

On average, unemployment insurance benefits replace just about 40% of a worker’s prelayoff wages. When accounting for the time-limited nature of UI income and the nonwage benefits that are part of the compensation package for many workers (benefits like employer-provided health insurance and retirement contributions), the true pay replacement rate is much lower.1 It is the states that set benefit levels, and states vary tremendously in the benefit levels they offer, due to different minimum and maximum benefits, as well as formulas for computing benefits based on wage history. There are currently no federal standards for UI benefits, and many states pay benefits that are so low they allow jobless workers to fall quickly into poverty during a spell of job loss (GAO 2020). In no state are UI benefits enough to cover a worker’s basic needs (Roberts and Schweitzer 2020).2

Black and Latino workers face greater hardship when they receive low levels of benefits because they are less likely than white workers to have private savings to use to supplement income from unemployment insurance (Gould-Werth 2021; Gould, Perez, and Wilson 2020; Gould and Wilson 2020). Women and workers of color are further disadvantaged because they are disproportionately clustered in low-paying jobs, and thus receive lower levels of benefits than their more highly compensated counterparts (Tucker and Vogtman 2020). In this way, the UI system entrenches and deepens existing inequities, particularly the systemic racism that has prevented workers of color from building family wealth (Bhutta et al. 2020; Kijakazi et al. 2019).

Workers with dependents, workers earning subminimum wages, tipped workers, and part-time workers all face particular difficulty making ends meet with the benefit levels to which they are entitled. In the current system people who are struggling as they seek to secure their first job or to reenter the labor market after an absence (for reasons that may extend from child-rearing to incarceration) receive no benefits at all. And despite the fact that unemployment spells are longer when economic conditions are worse, and that increasing unemployment benefits when the economy is in a downturn helps both individual workers and the macroeconomy by supporting spending, the regular UI program does not adjust benefit levels in response to economic trends (BLS 2021a; Bachas et al. 2020).

The solution

We can do better than a system that fails to alleviate severe economic hardship and deepens inequities. The policy proposals laid out below would increase the level of UI benefits, including making the benefit formula more progressive so that low-wage workers are better supported. The proposals also address the special difficulties that some groups of workers, particularly women and workers of color, face when trying to meet their need under the current system of determining unemployment benefit levels. Benefit levels should meet a guaranteed minimum in all states.

Implementation

Benefits offered by state-run UI systems should meet federally guaranteed minimums. To aid states in the determination of benefit levels, the federal Department of Labor should establish a system that computes benefit amounts from wage records that are collected in national data sets such as the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). Given that the recent work and earnings history of potential UI recipients is fully contained in QCEW data, it would be a straightforward task to compute each potential recipient’s UI benefit in a system where benefit levels were harmonized across the country. This would be a huge administrative efficiency improvement when compared with today’s patchwork system of benefit formulas that vary significantly by state.

Determining replacement rates

Each state sets its own formula for determining weekly benefit amounts—so the share of weekly wages that is “replaced” by unemployment insurance benefit payments vary widely by state. While the wage replacement rate thus varies by state, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration tracks replacement rates by state and region and computes a national average. Except for a brief period in the UI program’s early years, the wage replacement rate has remained below 40% (O’Leary and Rubin 1997; U.S. DOL-ETA 2021).

Context: How current low and uneven wage replacement rates fall short of what workers need

While UI benefits are higher for low-wage workers, they rarely exceed 50% of a worker’s previous wages. Social scientists agree that current wage replacement rates in the U.S. are too low (von Wachter 2019).

Because UI benefits replace only wages, and not benefits such as employer-paid health insurance premiums and employer-paid retirement contributions, the replacement rate of total compensation is even lower. Typically about 30% of what employers spend on employee compensation goes toward benefits (BLS 2021b), but UI payments replace only a portion of wages and ignore the much higher true monetary benefits that workers receive from work. Changes in the law in the 1970s and 1980s that made UI benefits taxable also reduce the value of benefits relative to workers’ prelayoff earnings.

Black and Latino workers are particularly harmed by low benefit amounts. For one, while many states have made it harder to access benefits in recent years, the states with the deepest cuts to their UI programs are mostly Southern states and have higher shares of Black residents (Kofman and Fresques 2020). Further, Black and Latino households have far lower private wealth on average than white households, and lower levels of wealth mean there is less ability to absorb the shock of income loss stemming from a spell of joblessness (Bhutta et al. 2020; Gould and Wilson 2020; Gould, Perez, and Wilson 2020).

In addition, there is a real problem in this country of workers being underpaid for their work, whether it is because they are deprived of overtime pay or paid a subminimum wage (Cooper and Kroger 2017). This reduces their benefits amounts and makes it difficult for them to cover basic necessities.

Policy proposal: Increase replacement rates using a progressive structure

To better assist all workers in meeting their basic needs while they search for work, UI benefit levels should be harmonized across all states by the U.S. Department of Labor and set progressively to provide low-wage workers with a higher replacement rate of pre-termination wages than their high-wage counterparts. Under the proposed progressive system for calculating UI benefits, different benefit rates apply to different levels of earnings for each worker, with rates falling as earnings rise (kind of like how marginal tax rates work, but in reverse). Table 5.1 shows the proposed replacement rates for earnings at different wage levels. The calculation used to determine the level of wage replacement at each level of earnings begins with dividing total earnings across the base period by the number of weeks in the base period to determine a worker’s average weekly wage. This number should be compared with the state’s average weekly wage (AWW) to determine the level of wage replacement. As shown in the table, under this progressive replacement rate structure, UI replaces 85% of wages a worker earns up to 50% of the state AWW, 70% of wages a worker earns that are between 51% and 100% of the state AWW, and 50% of wages a worker earns that are greater than 100% of the state AWW.

Table 5.1

Policy proposal: Set minimum and maximum benefit levels that ensure adequate benefit levels

Though formulas that set benefit levels as a percentage of weekly wages work well for workers in the middle of the earnings distribution, they are less effective for workers at the top and bottom of the earnings distribution: Low earners may end up with benefit levels that are too low to help them handle living expenses when their work income is reduced. State UI systems have recognized this issue and set minimum and maximum benefit levels. However, minimum and maximum benefit levels vary greatly across the states, and there is no federal standard states must meet.

Scant weekly benefits don’t pay bills for out-of-work restaurant worker

Ruby De La Rosa, Massachusetts

When the pandemic hit, I was given UI almost immediately, as my restaurant had closed for quarantine. At first, it was so easy and helpful. [But] once the additional $600 was removed from UI, I could no longer afford my rent, car payment, and other bills, [as I was] only approved for $174 a week. This is an unlivable wage. When I was working prior to the pandemic, I was making $600+ per week as a waitress.

We recommend setting standards for minimum and maximum benefit amounts as follows:

• minimum benefit amount of at least 30% of the state’s average weekly wage or $250 per week,3 whichever is greater
• maximum benefit amount of no more than 150% of the state’s average weekly wage

The choice to cap benefits for any individual worker at an amount equal to 150% of the state’s AWW is consistent with a sound social insurance principle—followed, for example, by the Social Security program—that benefits should rise in line with income so long as tax contributions rise as well.4 Table 5.2 shows how the rates and caps outlined in Table 5.1, when applied to earnings, produce progressive effective replacement rates for workers at a variety of points along the earnings distribution.

Table 5.2

Appendix Table 5a at the end of this section provides a detailed look at the calculations illustrating the progressive wage replacement structure proposed here, using examples that assume that the state’s average weekly wage is $1,000.

Ensuring that benefit levels are adequate for all groups of workers

Policy proposal: Implement a dependent allowance

Households with children are much more likely to face food and housing insecurity when a job is lost (Keith-Jennings, Nchako, and Llobrera 2021). Systemic racism contributes to this vulnerability for households headed by women of color, as women of color are overrepresented in low-wage work (Matthews and Wilson 2018). Women of color also are especially vulnerable as they make up a disproportionate share of single-parent households. Nondiscretionary expenses are higher for workers caring for dependents, such as young children, adult children with disabilities, aging parents, and full-time college students. Many of these expenses, such as child care, tuition, diapers, groceries, medical prescriptions, and care giving, can’t be reduced without great harm when households are faced with the income constraints associated with job loss.

Ten states currently offer dependent allowances, though amounts and eligible dependents vary by state (Whittaker and Isaacs 2019; U.S. DOL-ETA 2020). A national minimum standard is called for: In all states unemployment benefits should include additional supports for workers caring for dependents. We propose adding a dependent allowance of at least $35 per week per dependent (indexed to inflation) to workers’ benefits.

The definition of eligible dependents should be broad and include at least:

• children ages 18 and younger, including foster children, stepchildren, and children for whom the worker has at least 50% custody in shared-custody arrangements
• full-time students, up to the age of 26
• nonworking adults in the household ages 60 and older, such as workers’ parents
• adults with disabilities in the household

Table 5.3 shows how this change, combined with implementation of the progressive replacement rates outlines above, would affect benefit levels for hypothetical workers in Mississippi and Massachusetts.

Table 5.3

Policy proposal: Calculate benefit amounts for subminimum wage earners and tipped workers based on the prevailing minimum wage or the worker’s wages with tips, whichever is greater, so that subminimum wage workers aren’t penalized twice by their low earnings

There are 3 million tipped workers—disproportionately women and people of color—and over 100,000 workers with disabilities who are paid a subminimum wage (Allegretto and Cooper 2014; West 2019). Further, employers of some specific classes of workers, such as certain workers with disabilities, full-time or young workers in some sectors, and a few categories of agricultural workers carved out from the minimum wage provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, may be allowed to pay less than the prevailing minimum wage. Many workers are also paid less than the amount they are legally entitled to under the law. This phenomenon, known as wage theft, includes not paying promised pay, paying workers less than the legal minimum wage, failing to provide legally required overtime pay, confiscating tips, taking illegal deductions from wages, asking employees to work off the clock, and misclassifying employees as independent contractors to pay a wage lower than the legal minimum. Wage theft disproportionately hurts low-wage workers and has a very high cost for workers, as shown in a study on just one form of wage theft, which found that in the 10 most populous states, 2.4 million workers are paid below minimum wage, with their losses averaging about $3,300 per year per worker (Cooper and Kroeger 2017).5

Whether workers receive subminimum wages legally or illegally, their low earnings depress their UI benefit levels. In cases where workers qualify for unemployment insurance benefits but their reported wages are below the prevailing minimum wage,6 we propose calculating their benefits as though they had earned the prevailing minimum wage. Tipped workers who earn a subminimum wage should be able to self-report their tips and then have their UI benefits calculated on the basis of their earnings with tips or the prevailing minimum wage, whichever is greater. Finally, it is worth highlighting that the minimum benefit formula outlined above should go a long way in improving UI benefits for workers earning subminimum wages.

Policy proposal: Mandate that administrative data collected from UI programs across the country include hours worked by employee, so that programs can calculate more adequate benefit levels for subminimum wage workers

Note that there are data collection implications for the subminimum wage earner benefits proposal. Calculating what workers would have earned had they earned the minimum wage requires multiplying their hours worked by the minimum wage. Currently, only a small number of states collect data on hours worked by individuals. As part of their data collection and reporting to the federal Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages or QCEW (the federal database of administrative data from UI programs across the country), states would have to collect data on the hours worked by individuals. But this data capacity would already be expanding as we pursue the recommendations made in other sections of this report. Specifically, in Section 2, on finance, we recommend that states switch to an experience rating method for determining an employer’s UI tax rate that measures the hours worked of each employer’s workforce (instead of basing the tax rate on unemployment insurance claims filed by the firm’s workers). If states are already collecting this data, there is only a small incremental effort needed to record these hours by worker. Given that states such as Minnesota and Washington already maintain these records, hours collection is well within the capacity of other state systems. Collecting hours-worked in the QCEW provides important benchmarks for other federal data surveys, and thus would also offer significant informational benefits for researchers and policymakers.

Policy proposal: Pay fair benefits to part-time workers

State UI systems badly mistreat underemployed workers, imposing harsh and economically irrational rules on workers who return to the workforce on a part-time basis. In theory, most states allow a worker to continue to claim UI even if they collect some part-time wages, but existing state rules make little sense. Workers can earn up to a set amount, known as the “disregard,” but then every dollar earned above that amount reduces UI benefits dollar for dollar. In effect, this is a remarkably inefficient tax system: it imposes a zero tax rate up until a cliff, then a 100% rate after the cliff. Further, in many states, the earnings disregard is so low—$30 or $40—that there is no real point to working at all.

In a UI program with minimum federal standards, the earnings disregard should be set at a level that enables part-time workers to access unemployment insurance while they search for full-time work, and encourages unemployed workers to work part time as they search for full-time work. We propose implementing an earnings disregard in which all earnings from part-time work are disregarded until the sum of a worker’s part-time wages and UI benefit exceeds 110% of prelayoff wages.7 Workers’ combined benefits plus part-time earnings could modestly exceed their previous weekly wage because even at equal earnings, part-time work typically is not a full replacement, either in terms of benefits or security. As an alternative, federal law could require a disregard of no less than 50% of the worker’s average weekly benefit, as several states now permit.

Arts worker pays high penalty for working part time

Nate Claus, New York

As a freelance union stage manager for theater, dance, opera, and other live events, when my show closes, it almost always means that the entire company shuts down. That puts us all out of work simultaneously. Because of this cycle, folks in my business rely on a combination of “day jobs” and unemployment insurance to help us to survive as we search for the next gig.

Unfortunately, day jobs, by nature, are often on call or part time. I have had to accept part-time work for earned wages that reduced my unemployment benefits to the degree that my income those weeks was less than it was for weeks where I didn’t work at all. If our UI system were set up in a way that put unemployed workers first, it would make such a critical difference in my life.

Policy proposal: Support job seekers newly entering or reentering the labor force with an allowance of $200 per week or 20% of the state’s average weekly wage

The unemployment insurance system should be reimagined to support all job seekers in the labor force, not just those with a narrowly defined qualifying loss of a job under a traditional employer-employee relationship. In addition to supporting them with financial UI benefits, the prospect of financial benefits may encourage UI applications from job seekers and bring them into other employment assistance and workforce development programs. As described in the eligibility chapter of this report, we propose establishing a jobseeker’s allowance to workers newly entering the labor force and searching for work, and workers who are reentering the labor force after taking time away. We propose that the benefits for eligible job seekers should be set at the greater of 20% of the state’s average weekly wage or $200 per week (indexed to median wage growth). Workers eligible for the jobseeker’s allowance would also be eligible for dependent allowances.

Setting benefit levels during economic downturns

Policy proposal: Make weekly benefit amounts responsive to periods of economic downturn

Benefits should be increased when labor demand is depressed, not only to better support workers, but also to provide more effective macroeconomic stabilization. When the economy is depressed and vacancies fall below the number of jobless workers, it is low economywide spending that is holding back employment growth, not workers who aren’t looking hard enough for jobs. More-generous UI benefits can help boost this spending. Yet until 2020, the only past effort to increase UI benefits to respond to the business cycle was a relatively tiny $25 weekly addition during the Great Recession.

These past failures to boost the low baseline levels of UI benefit generosity during recessions hampered the system’s ability to serve as an effective macroeconomic stabilizer. Indeed, evidence from increased benefit levels during the COVID-19 crisis indicates that increasing benefit levels during moments of macroeconomic contraction results in large boosts to aggregate demand and strong spending.8

As described in Section 4, on benefit duration, our proposed extended benefits triggers are reliable indicators of macroeconomic contraction. In periods when extended benefits trigger on, we propose adjusting the replacement rate formulae for all benefits as follows:

• 100% for wages up to 50% of the state’s average weekly wage, up from 85% in non-EB periods
• 85% for wages between 51% and 100% of the state’s average weekly wage, up from 70% in non-EB periods
• 65% for wages greater than 100% of the state’s average weekly wage, up from 50% in non-EB periods

In addition, we propose:

• increasing the minimum benefit to the greater of $300 per week or 40% of the state’s average weekly wage
• increasing the weekly allowance per dependent to $50 (indexed to inflation)

Finally, we propose increasing jobseeker’s allowance benefits to the greater of $250 or 30% of the state’s average weekly wage per week (with the $250 threshold indexed to median wage growth).

Reforming taxation of UI benefits

The real value of UI benefits to claimants is reduced through taxation. UI benefits were fully tax exempt for the first 40 years of the U.S. system, but then taxes were phased in between 1978 and 1986. The historic rationale for imposing UI taxes was to reduce the desirability of receiving UI relative to the desirability of working.9 Yet as described in Section 4, contemporary research shows that there is little empirical basis for concerns about the economic effects of increasing the take-home value of UI benefits.10

Indeed, taxing benefits adds additional complexity and compliance costs to the system and reduces take-up of UI benefits (Anderson and Meyer 1997), preventing the program from effectively serving its dual mandate of smoothing consumption for workers who lose jobs through no fault of their own and stabilizing the macroeconomy. There are, however, some reasons to tax UI benefits. In the absence of UI benefit taxation, well-compensated workers who draw benefits part of the year, or high-income dual-earner households with one separated worker, will receive a higher after-tax replacement rate than low earners.

Policy proposal: Exempt UI income from federal taxes for low-income households

We recommend exempting UI income received by low-income households from federal income tax.11 This will increase take-up and increase effective benefit levels for households with the highest marginal propensity to consume—to spend their benefits and thus help boost aggregate demand—thereby improving UI’s ability to function as a macroeconomic stabilizer (Bivens 2017). At a minimum, to reduce the extent to which federal taxes pull fiscal resources out of states with more-generous UI systems, federal income tax on UI benefits could be redeposited in state trust funds.

While we strongly recommend exemption, were low-earner benefits to be taxed, we would recommend allowing them to be treated as “earnings” for Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) purposes.

Policy proposal: Phase out exemption so that UI benefits received by households whose  adjusted gross income exceeds $150,000 are fully taxed

To increase equity when generating federal revenue, we recommend phasing out exemption for high-income households. The American Rescue Plan fully taxed UI benefits for households with adjusted gross income greater than $150,000, and we recommend following that benchmark, although with a more gradual phase-out beginning at $100,000 AGI.

Appendix Table 5A

Endnotes

1. For example, see Table 1 in the federal government periodic summary of what employers spend on employee compensation for the shares attributable to wages versus benefits (BLS 2021b).

2. According to Roberts and Schweitzer (2020), “there isn’t a single county, parish, borough, census area, or city in the United States where state unemployment benefits alone can cover a set of very modest monthly expenses (for example, the 40th percentile of area rent) for a typical one-adult, one-child family.”

3. The $250 weekly benefit amount would change over time, as it would be indexed to median wage growth.

4. A key proposal in section 2 of  this report would increase the taxable maximum for the base of the Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) tax to be equal to the taxable maximum for the base of the Social Security (Federal Insurance Contributions Act or FICA) tax, which was just under $143,000 in 2021. A worker earning $143,000 annually makes roughly $2,750 each week, and under the formulas proposed in this section would qualify for a UI benefit of roughly $1,775. This rounds up roughly to 150% of the average weekly wage in 2020, which was just under $1,200 nationally.

5. See Cooper and Kroeger 2017 for an overview of wage theft in the U.S. economy and an estimate of its reach.

6. At the local, state, or federal level.

7. If macroeconomic conditions warrant the triggering of extended benefits, it is beneficial to the macroeconomy to raise benefit levels, so during extended benefit periods, we propose that all earnings from part-time work be disregarded unless the sum of a worker’s part-time wages and UI benefit exceeds 125% of their prelayoff wages.

8. See Ganong et al. 2021 for evidence on the large macroeconomic boost provided by pandemic-related UI expansions, including increases in benefit generosity.

9. It is sometimes argued that UI benefits should be taxed because they are replacements for wages, but this is also true in a general sense for benefits from Social Security, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and other safety-net programs. These programs are generally untaxed or only partly taxed because it is simpler to adjust benefit levels directly, rather than issuing benefits and then taxing back part of the value of that benefit. Further, federal taxation of state-funded UI benefits is effectively a federal surtax on state UI tax collections (Galle and Pancotti 2021). For any given target replacement rate a state might choose, federal taxation of benefits requires the state to pay more, and therefore to impose more in state taxes, to achieve the identical replacement rate.

10. The literature on the employment effects of potential benefit duration discussed in Section 4 is applicable here, as longer durations increase the net take-home value.

11. The arguments for exempting state UI benefits from federal tax are stronger than the case for states exempting their own benefits. We do not recommend requiring states to exempt UI from their own income tax, although federal exemption would automatically result in state exemption in about half of states.

References

Allegretto, Sylvia, and David Cooper. 2014. Twenty-Three Years and Still Waiting for Change: Why It’s Time to Give Tipped Workers the Regular Minimum Wage. Economic Policy Institute, July 2014.

Anderson, Patricia M., and Bruce Meyer D. 1997. “Unemployment Insurance Takeup Rates and the After-Tax Value of Benefits.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 3 (August): 913–937.

Bachas, Natalie, Peter Ganong, Pascal J. Noel, Joseph S. Vavra, Arlene Wong, Diana Farrell, and Fiona E. Greig. 2020. “Initial Impacts of the Pandemic on Consumer Behavior: Evidence from Linked Income, Spending, and Savings Data.” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 27617, July 2020. DOI 10.3386/w27617

Bhutta, Neil, Andrew Chang, Lisa Detting, and Joanne Hsu. 2020. “Disparities in Wealth by Race and Ethnicity in the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances.” Federal Reserve Board FEDS Notes, September 28, 2020.

Bivens, Josh. 2017. Inequality Is Slowing U.S. Economic Growth: Faster Wage Growth for Low- and Middle-Wage Workers Is the Solution. Economic Policy Institute, December 2017.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2021a. “Duration of Unemployment” (data graphic related to Employment Situation Summary April 2021).

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2021b. “Employer Costs for Employee Compensation –December 2020” (news release). March 18, 2021.

Cooper, David, and Teresa Kroeger. 2017. Employers Steal Billions from Workers’ Paychecks Each Year. Economic Policy Institute, May 2017.

Galle, Brian, and Elizabeth Pancotti. 2021. The Case for Forgiving Taxes on Pandemic Unemployment Aid. The Century Foundation, February 2021.

Ganong, Peter, Fiona Greig, Max Liebeskind, Pascal Noel, Daniel M. Sullivan, and Joseph Vavra. 2021. “Spending and Job Search Impacts of Expanded Unemployment Benefits: Evidence from Administrative Microdata.” Becker-Friedman Institute Working Paper No. 2021-19, February 2021.

Gould, Elise, and Valerie Wilson. 2020. Black Workers Face Two of the Most Lethal Preexisting Conditions for Coronavirus—Racism and Economic Inequality. Economic Policy Institute, June 2020.

Gould, Elise, Daniel Perez, and Valerie Wilson. 2020. Latinx Workers—Particularly Women—Face Devastating Job Losses in the COVID-19 Recession. Economic Policy Institute, August 2020.

Gould-Werth, Alix. 2021. Research on Race and Consumption Shows Why Racial Disparities in Unemployment Insurance Receipt are Detrimental to Economic Recovery in the United States. Washington Center for Equitable Growth, March 2021.

Government Accountability Office (GAO). 2020. COVID-19: Urgent Actions Needed to Better Ensure an Effective Federal Response. Report to Congressional Committees. November 2020.

Keith-Jennings, Brynne, Catlin Nchako, and Joseph Llobrera. 2021. Number of Families Struggling to Afford Food Rose Steeply in Pandemic and Remains High, Especially Among Children and Households of Color. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. April 2020.

Kijakazi, Kilolo, K. Steven Brown, Donnie Charleston, and Charmaine Runes. 2019. What Would It Take to Overcome the Damaging Effects of Structural Racism and Ensure a More Equitable Future? Urban Institute. May 2019.

Kofman, Ava, and Hannah Fresques. 2020. “Black Workers Are More Likely to Be Unemployed but Less Likely to Get Unemployment Benefits.” ProPublica. August 24, 2020.

Matthews, Madison, and Valerie Wilson. 2018. “Separate is Still Unequal: How Patterns of Occupational Segregation Impact Pay for Black Women.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), August 6, 2018.

O’Leary, Christopher, and Murray Rubin. 1997. “Adequacy of the Weekly Benefit Amount.” In Unemployment Insurance in the United States: Analysis of Policy Issues, edited by Christopher O’Leary and Stephen Wandner, 163–210. Kalamazoo, Mich.: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Roberts, Lily, and Justin Schweitzer. 2020. “You Can’t Afford to Live Anywhere in the United States Solely on Unemployment Insurance.” Center for American Progress. September 2020.

Tucker, Jasmine, and Julie Vogtman. 2020. When Hard Work is Not Enough: Women in Low-Paid Jobs. National Women’s Law Center, April 2020.

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2020. “Monetary Entitlement” in Comparison of State Unemployment Laws 2020,

U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL-ETA). 2021. UI Replacement Rates Report (online database). Accessed April 2021.

von Wachter, Till. 2019. “Unemployment Insurance Reform.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 686, no. 1 (November): 121–146.

West, Rachel. 2019. “Everyone is Overlooking a Key Part of the New $15 Minimum Wage Bill.” TalkPoverty, June 19, 2019.

Whittaker, Julie M., and Katelin P. Isaacs. 2019. Unemployment Insurance: Programs and Benefits. Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report RL33362, October 2019.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

The unemployment insurance (UI) system is a cornerstone of our economic infrastructure. It supports working people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own with cash benefits while steadying the economy during crises. A successful UI system can be the centerpiece of economic recovery, particularly for those communities, such as workers of color, who bear the brunt of downturns and are left behind in the wake of recessions. In addition to sustaining people through jobless spells, swift and adequate UI benefits during recoveries would allow workers to search for good jobs, not just the first job that comes along. UI benefits that serve as a bridge back to good, well-matched jobs help to ensure that the economy grows faster and that people don’t get trapped in low-quality jobs that depress their lifetime earnings.

Unfortunately, the current federal–state UI system, financed by state and federal taxes, is crumbling. It fails to serve many workers, ramps up too slowly and unevenly to stabilize the economy during recessions, and sets perverse incentives for states and employers that undermine program integrity. States set most rules, and the vast majority of states set benefits too low and cut them off after too short a time. Many workers, especially low-wage and involuntary part-time workers, are left out entirely, and workers of color are overrepresented in both these groups. Exclusionary eligibility rules are just one of many racial disparities state control creates.

Temporary UI programs first enacted as part of the CARES Act at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic papered over a few of these problems. But even those emergency programs have proven inadequate, with already overstretched state systems failing to get out emergency benefits in a timely manner. Once again, workers of color, who are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus downturn, are at risk of being left behind. Half of the states are now choosing to cut off their residents’ access to these programs early, causing extraordinary harm to vulnerable families and impeding economic recovery. GOP governors’ attacks on these critical emergency benefits are the most vivid and recent manifestation of recurring dysfunction in the UI system: The federal government has ceded so much control to states that it has failed to equitably protect working people.

The fundamental necessity of the UI system, and the human suffering and economic instability caused by its repeated failures, should compel drastic changes. The basic remedy is clear: a stronger federal role. Building on recommendations from workers and experts alike, this report proposes five priority recommendations for urgent interventions to ensure the UI system can sustain families and the economy, with detailed actionable proposals for each recommendation.

The time is ripe for a fundamental worker-led reimagining of the UI system; in the meantime Congress must immediately implement the following equity-focused steps to repair and stabilize the system:

• Guarantee universal minimum standards for benefits eligibility, duration, and levels, with states free to enact more expansive benefits
• Reform financing of UI to eliminate incentives for states and employers to exclude workers and reduce benefits
• Update UI eligibility to match the modern workforce, and guarantee benefits to everyone looking for work but still jobless through no fault of their own
• Expand UI benefit duration to provide longer protection during normal times and use better measures of labor market distress to automatically extend and sustain benefits during downturns
• Increase UI benefits to levels working families can survive on

Detailed summary of proposals

The tables below summarize some of our key proposals and compare them with existing policy. Individual chapters in the report discuss these policies in detail and provide additional important reforms. See the Appendix Table for a broader list of reforms.

Guarantee universal minimum standards for benefits eligibility, duration, and levels, with states free to enact more expansive benefits

There are no federal standards governing who can receive UI, how much money, or for how long. States compete to lower the UI tax burden for businesses and are currently replenishing depleted trust funds by shortening benefit duration and tightening eligibility. Some states offer just 12 weeks of benefits, and benefits replace just about 40% of average wages, which is not nearly enough for workers, particular low-wage workers with families, to get by. Workers experience radically different support from the UI system depending on where they live, with the average weekly benefit in states with high shares of Black workers significantly lower than that of states with high shares of white workers.

Reform financing of UI to eliminate incentives for states and employers to exclude workers and reduce benefits

The current financing of the UI system incentivizes employers and states to obstruct delivery of unemployment benefits. Anemic funding formulas result in state UI trust funds that are easily depleted during recessions. To replenish those trust funds, states cut their benefits and restrict eligibility rather than raise payroll taxes. This race to the bottom manifested after the Great Recession and appears poised to repeat: In 2021, a handful of state legislatures have cut or proposed cutting benefits in their regular UI programs, with more likely to follow in 2022, even as the recurring need for federal intervention to fund emergency temporary benefits programs during recessions has shown that existing benefits are inadequate. In addition, the financing system rewards employers who prevent their employees from claiming benefits, turning employers into adversaries to workers navigating the UI system, rather than allies.

Update UI eligibility to match the modern workforce, and guarantee benefits to everyone looking for work but still jobless through no fault of their own

State rules have left too many holes in UI’s safety net. Leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, less than 3 in 10 (28%) of unemployed workers actually received UI benefits, down from the approximately 36% who received UI benefits before the Great Recession. State eligibility rules often exclude the share of the workforce employed in part-time, low-wage, seasonal, and temporary work. Due to historical inequality and ongoing systemic bias, people of color and immigrants are more likely than white workers, and women are more likely than men, to be in low-wage jobs. And workers of color are more likely to be working part time but want full-time hours. For these workers, a lack of workplace power is exacerbated by their inability to rely on UI while searching for better jobs. The changes proposed would cement their inclusion and expand eligibility to include other workers.

Expand UI benefit duration to provide longer protection during normal times and use better measures of labor market distress to automatically extend and sustain benefits during downturns

The standard number of weeks provided by most states for their regular UI programs is 26—well below international norms—and at least nine states currently provide fewer than 26 weeks of benefits. Though the Extended Benefits (EB) program provides additional jobless aid during periods of labor market distress, its current design is flawed, failing to respond to the true severity of recessions and failing to add enough weeks of coverage. These problems leave Congress to authorize ad hoc extensions. When Congress allows these temporary programs to lapse before the job market has recovered, as happened briefly in December 2020, it jeopardizes the financial security of millions of families and slows economic recovery.

Increase UI benefits to levels working families can survive on

UI benefits typically only replace about 40% of workers’ prelayoff wages and vary tremendously by state. Furthermore, many states pay benefits that are much lower—so low that workers can fall quickly into poverty during a spell of job loss. In no state are UI benefits enough to cover a worker’s basic needs. Benefits are especially low for the kinds of jobs disproportionately filled by women and workers of color, many of whom lack the savings needed to survive spells of joblessness. In this way the UI system entrenches and deepens existing inequities, including the systemic racism that has prevented workers of color from building family wealth.

The policy proposals laid out below would better alleviate severe economic hardship and reduce inequities.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

Key proposals

• Duration of standard benefits: Provide longer protection for unemployed workers during normal economic times by setting the minimum duration of potential benefits at 30 weeks during periods of low unemployment.

• Duration of extended benefits: Respond faster and more uniformly to growing labor market distress by using federal and state unemployment rates and changes in unemployment rates to automatically and rapidly trigger on extended benefits when the economy is deteriorating (when the unemployment rate reaches 5% or is 1.3 times the minimum unemployment rate in the previous year). Enhance the economy-stabilizing effects of extended benefits by lengthening duration as the labor market worsens, to as many as 99 weeks (when the unemployment rate reaches 10% or 3.2 times the initial minimum unemployment rate).
• Phased reductions of extended benefits: Support still-struggling groups of workers and stabilize state economies by eliminating “look-back” provisions that allow extended benefits to trigger off while the labor market remains weak (when unemployment is stabilizing at an elevated level or falling only because people have given up actively searching for work). Instead, sustain benefits until unemployment rates are declining and the declines are driven by rising employment (as indicated by a 0.2% reduction in the share of the state’s 25- to 54-year-olds with a job, i.e., the prime-age employment-to-population (EPOP) ratio (see Table 4.1 for the full set of on- and off-triggers).
• Federal data enhancements: Acknowledge the workers who tend to be left behind in recoveries with more targeted data. Require the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to develop state-level measures of prime-age employment rates that are reliable enough to use as UI off-triggers. Also require the BLS and the Department of Labor Office of Employment and Training Administration (U.S. DOL ETA) to analyze flows of workers out of UI recipiency and into paid employment by demographic and labor market characteristic to ensure that benefit extensions under future reforms do not trigger off when the overall labor market improves but it is actually just more-credentialed workers who are benefiting.

Introduction

The problem

The maximum length of time for which eligible workers can receive unemployment insurance benefits is too short in many states in normal times, grows too slowly and too little under automatic expansions during times of economic distress, is often prematurely cut short, and reinforces existing damaging disparities in the labor market by race.

Currently, it is up to state legislators to set the “potential benefit duration” (PBD) for the standard UI programs in their state. The current UI system does not provide benefits that last long enough to alleviate economic insecurity and enable workers to secure well-matched reemployment during normal economic times, largely because the standard number of weeks provided by most states—26—is well below international norms, and because a growing number of states provide even fewer weeks of eligibility.

Further, during times of labor market distress caused by negative economic shocks, potential benefit duration is not responsive enough to economic conditions. The automatic triggers that extend additional weeks of benefits to workers in high-unemployment states under the permanent Extended Benefits (EB) program have glaring flaws. Those flaws—explained below—have prompted Congresses in past recessions to enact ad hoc emergency programs to provide additional federal UI benefits. For example, over the Great Recession and through 2013, roughly 8.5 times as many weekly claimants received benefits from the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program enacted by Congress in 2008 than from the EB program.1

The weakening of social insurance stemming from the shrinkage of potential benefit duration in some states in normal economic times and the failure to always maintain extended PBDs during periods of macroeconomic distress is apparent. UI is meant as wage replacement during periods of joblessness, but unemployed workers who receive fewer weeks of benefits have a smaller share of wages replaced by UI benefits and are under greater pressure to accept alternative work that is not a good fit for their skills and preferences.2 Further, cuts in weeks of benefits are highly likely to disproportionately harm workers with job search barriers like a lack of formal credentials or systemic discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, or other factors. These workers—and others who have a smaller cushion of savings for emergencies—rely on the social insurance function of UI the most, and shrinking PBDs disproportionately harm them.3 Short benefit duration particularly harms workers of color, as structural racism in labor markets leads to their suffering long durations of unemployment on average (BLS 2021). The limited duration of UI benefits keeps the UI system from being fully effective, not only in alleviating economic insecurity during downturns but also in providing a needed boost to the overall economy: Extending unemployment insurance to workers who then spend that money on necessities in the economy is one of the most prominent ways the federal government can combat macroeconomic contraction, and current policy prevents this tool from being used effectively.

The solution

A small number of straightforward policy reforms can significantly address the problems with potential benefit duration in the current UI system. We propose policy reforms to shore up the baseline level of PBD during normal times, make PBDs adjust rapidly and predictably—without relying on ad hoc actions by Congress—during periods of labor market distress, and ramp down gradually as key economic benchmarks are hit. Federal law should guarantee universal minimum benefit duration, as we now detail.

Implementation

Federal standards should be implemented to ensure that all states follow the processes for determining benefit duration outlined in this chapter.

Setting potential benefit duration in normal economic times

Unemployment insurance is a hybrid federal–state program. During normal times when the labor market is not distressed, states finance the regular UI system and state legislatures decide the potential benefit duration for their state. For decades following the enactment of the UI system, all states followed a norm that the minimum PBD should be 26 weeks. Before the Great Recession of 2008, for example, all states had PBDs of least 26 weeks.

However, since then, many states have weakened this standard. Before the COVID-19 economic shock hit the U.S. in March 2020, 10 states had reduced PBDs in their normal UI programs to less than 26 weeks (Whittaker and Isaacs 2019; Evermore 2020).4 Additionally, even after the COVID-19 shock prompted some states to restore some weeks of benefits, bills were introduced in a handful of states to reduce PBDs, and one appears headed for the governor’s signature (Golshan and Delaney 2021; Styf 2021).5 Reductions in normal PBD take needed assistance away from families while they are still struggling, as well as undermining the system’s macroeconomic stabilization goals in times of crisis.

Context: How low baseline levels of benefit duration weaken the economic stabilizing capacity of the standard UI program

When the economy contracts and people are no longer working, their earnings losses translate directly into spending declines, leading to further contraction. UI benefits kick in during these periods of macroeconomic contraction and offset some of that lost spending, helping to stabilize the economy. Low baseline levels of state PBDs hurt the macroeconomic stabilization function of the UI system in at least three ways. First, even during steep and long recessions, the majority of unemployed workers are getting UI benefits through standard programs, not extended benefits programs (including both the regular EB program and the ad hoc emergency programs).6 If the PBDs of these normal programs are shortened, it makes UI less effective as an automatic stabilizer. This is particularly true early in recessions, before any extended or emergency benefit programs have a chance to kick in.

Second, the states with reduced PBDs during normal times are also states with notably low recipiency rates, and these low baseline levels combined with their potential to discourage workers from applying mean there is less UI benefit spending stabilizing the economy.7 (Short PBDs might help convince unemployed workers that it is not worth the potential hassles of navigating the UI system.)8

Third, in the current system, the generosity of federal financing for extended benefits is determined in part by the state’s PBD of normal UI benefits, and this is often the case as well with the ad hoc emergency benefit increases financed during recent recessions. Reducing normal PBDs can hence reduce states’ availability to receive federal financing for extended benefits, or can reduce the amount they receive.

Policy proposal: Set a minimum potential benefit duration of 30 weeks during normal economic times

Before the COVID-19 shock, the state with the longest PBD was Massachusetts, which provided 30 weeks of benefits. Given that 30 weeks obviously provides longer protection for laid-off workers, and given that there is little to no evidence that the longer PBD in Massachusetts did any harm to their labor market or state economy, we suggest that the current gold standard among U.S. states set the new benchmark for a reformed UI system.

It is perhaps useful to note that a 30-week minimum would still leave the benefits available in the United States among the shortest in the developed world. Figure 4A shows the maximum PBD across a wide range of U.S. peer countries.

Social scientists agree that 26 weeks is too short to effectively serve UI’s basic purposes. Outside recessions, 2 million individuals on average collect some UI benefits in a given week. Of these, between 200,000 and 300,000 individuals will exhaust their available UI benefits each month (von Wachter 2019).

Figure A

Setting potential benefit duration during downturns

The existing “automatic” system for increasing the number of weeks that unemployed workers can receive UI benefits during economic downturns has triggers that are deeply flawed. The Extended Benefits program triggers are not responsive enough, do not trigger benefits early enough during downturns, and “trigger off” extended benefits too soon. Again, by making benefits too brief, these flaws deepen family hardship and worsen recessions.

Context: How the current Extended Benefits program works

Under the Extended Benefits program, if an economic shock causes a state’s labor market to deteriorate to certain low benchmarks, the federal government funds (but the states will administer) additional weeks of benefits to workers who have exhausted their regular benefits. By establishing benchmarks that trigger extended benefits, past Congresses acknowledged that UI benefits should automatically last longer during labor market downturns. But as explained below, the precise design of the existing EB program often renders these triggers far less useful than they should be.

First, a note about financing. Under permanent law, the EB program is financed 50% by the federal government, though in an ad hoc way during recessions, Congress has usually amended federal law to provide for 100% federal funding of EB.

The total number of additional weeks typically ranges from 13 to 20 weeks, depending on state laws and state unemployment rates. Specifically, the EB program provides two tiers of extended PBDs: tier 1 adds 13 weeks and tier 2 adds an additional seven weeks. The mandatory triggers for tier 1 are based on the level and/or the change in the insured unemployment rate (IUR)—a measure of the share of people in the labor force who are receiving UI benefits. Obviously, this measure can vary not only by labor market conditions but also based on state-level eligibility criteria, as states with stricter eligibility criteria would have lower IUR rates, all else being equal. As will be explained in more detail below, the IUR is a deeply flawed measure of labor market distress that should be replaced with a trigger that is a much more focused measure of labor market distress: the official unemployment rate, a measure that includes workers who are unemployed but not receiving UI benefits. States can also opt to use an additional EB trigger that is based on the standard unemployment rate. Currently, more than half (27) of the states use only the IUR-based trigger for their EB program.9

Figure 4B illustrates that the existing base EB triggers fail to adequately extend benefits during the onset of recessions, and they cut extended benefits off far too soon to ensure support for jobless workers and an expedited recovery. It shows the share of UI recipients that were on standard UI, EB programs, and the discretionary programs (for example, the Emergency Unemployment Compensation or EUC program enacted by Congress during the Great Recession). It is particularly evident that in the wake of the Great Recession, EB programs did far less work in providing benefits to unemployed workers than the discretionary EUC program. Clearly, the existing triggers in UI need fixing to make sure the system is as responsive to downturns as it should be.

Figure 4B

Context: How flaws with the current EB program’s on-triggers delay benefits and hurt workers in low unemployment states

Both of the triggers for turning on extended benefits have flaws. The insured unemployment rate often fails to reflect the true state of labor market distress because state UI policies can suppress UI recipiency in normal times. For example, if many of a state’s workers are unemployed, but because of strict eligibility guidelines are not receiving UI, then they are not counted in the IUR. States that use the standard unemployment rate triggers for EB see many more unemployed workers newly enrolled due to EB triggering-on during periods of labor market weakness.10

Both triggers are state-specific only and hence cannot be triggered on by deterioration in the national labor markets. Failing to include national as well as state triggers is problematic for several reasons. First, as mentioned above, residents of an otherwise low-unemployment state who live in a region with higher unemployment that is suffering due to a deterioration in the national labor market could be frozen out of aid. Second, without national triggers providing for wider extension of PBDs, the EB program provides a weaker macroeconomic stabilizer effect. Finally, without national triggers, states may suffer lags in extending benefits. A state with low unemployment as the national labor market deteriorates is highly likely to see its own unemployment rate rise shortly. Policymakers once recognized the value of a national trigger in helping states stay ahead of the curve: The EB program included a national unemployment trigger until the 1981 Omnibus Reconciliation Act.11

Context: How flaws with the current EB program’s off-triggers prompt premature withdrawal of needed assistance

By far the biggest problem with the current UI system’s EB triggers is that benefits are set to trigger off too early during periods of extended labor market distress. The EB program contains “look-back” provisions which trigger benefits off if there has been no significant increase in unemployment over the past two years. In essence, the EB program was structured under an implicit assumption (not so wrong before the 1990s) that labor market recovery would happen very quickly after recessions hit. So, for example, if unemployment rises even to an extremely elevated level like 9% and then stays there for two years, the EB provisions would automatically trigger off. This is not an academic concern. The national unemployment rate hit 9.0% in April 2009, but remained at 9.0% (or higher) until September 2011.

Context: How the ad hoc off-triggers for emergency aid hurt workers

After the 20 weeks of EB benefits (including both tier 1 and tier 2) are added to normal UI benefits, further extensions to PBDs have to be legislated on an ad hoc basis by Congress. In recent decades these extensions were labeled “temporary emergency unemployment compensation” or “emergency unemployment compensation” (TEUC or EUC), and were fully federally financed. These programs have been tied to calendar periods rather than economic conditions, and often lapse well before the economy recovers. For example, the federally financed extended benefits included in the CARES Act passed in April 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 economic shock—the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) benefits—lapsed at the end of 2020, when the virus was surging and the labor market remained very weak.

Sometimes these lapses are temporary, and longer PBDs are reextended after a short break, but temporary income losses can be devastating to households on tight budgets even if the programs are reextended and payments are retroactive —and cause extreme anxiety among workers depending on benefits.12 Sometimes these lapses are permanent. The EUC program put into place during the Great Recession in 2008 was allowed to completely lapse by the end of 2013, when unemployment had just barely dipped below 7% nationally and sat above its highest level during the early 2000s recession and jobless recovery. And by late May 2021, half of the states had announced plans to cut off their residents’ access to some or all of the emergency programs enacted in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic: the PEUC program as well as the Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (PUC) program offering $300 weekly in enhanced benefits and the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program offering benefits to workers traditionally denied UI, like self-employed workers (Berger 2021; Zeballos-Roig and Kaplan 2021).13 This threatened to cause extraordinary harm to vulnerable families and to impede economic recovery (Cooper 2021). Given that workers of color bore the brunt of the coronavirus downturn, they are at risk, once again, of being left behind (Gould and Wilson 2020; Gould, Perez, and Wilson 2020).

These glaring flaws regarding the triggers of extended PBDs—automatic extensions that trigger on too slowly and unevenly and can trigger off while the labor market remains weak, and the reliance on congressional whim rather than economic conditions to determine further PBD extensions—can be fixed by reforms we suggest below.

Policy proposal: Reform the Extended Benefits program to trigger on quickly as the labor market deteriorates and trigger off only when genuine recovery is underway

To ensure that unemployment benefits trigger on quickly as labor market distress begins and remain in place until the labor market mounts a genuine recovery, we propose the parameters for triggering on and off new tiers of PBD shown below in Table 4.1. Triggers-on are determined by the minimum of state or national unemployment rates—not the insured unemployment rate—and are determined by either a prespecified unemployment rate or a change in the unemployment rate. Triggers-off require both a reduction in either the state or national unemployment rate and an improvement in state-level measures of the share of adults between the ages of 25 and 54 with a job, known as the prime-age employment-to-population (EPOP) ratio. We sometimes refer to the prime-age EPOP ratio as a “failsafe” criterion, in that it will keep PBDs from falling into a lower tier based on improvements in the unemployment rate that are driven solely by reductions in labor force participation.

Table 4.1

Triggers-on proposal

The key to effective triggers to turning on extended UI benefits is to ensure they respond quickly and provide longer PBDs as the labor market falters. We propose the on-triggers respond to the minimum of state or national unemployment rates. Existing triggers were designed in an era when unemployment rate expectations were much higher than today. As the Federal Reserve (2020) has observed, “it has become increasingly clear that low unemployment can be sustained without leading to an unwanted increase in inflation.”

Thus, we recommend that the first tier of longer PBDs (rising from 30 to 33 weeks) be triggered on when the state or national unemployment rate hits 5%. However, to ensure that states with traditionally low unemployment rates can see longer PBDs as their unemployment rate deteriorates quickly, we also allow the tier to be triggered on by a rise in the unemployment rate to 1.2 times the minimum unemployment rate that prevailed in the previous 12 months. So, if in July 2021 a state experienced an unemployment rate of 3.5% in any one of the months between the previous July through June, an unemployment rate of 4.2% in July 2021 would trigger on the first tier (33 weeks) of longer PBDs. This modification ensures that PBD extensions respond quickly to obvious deterioration in the labor market (say that caused by the onset of a health crisis like COVID-19 or by hurricanes and other natural disasters), even when the labor market was starting from a healthy state with a historically low unemployment rate.

From the first tier of extended PBDs, each additional percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate would trigger longer PBDs, as shown in Table 4.1. PBDs max out at 98 weeks for unemployment rates of 10% or higher. The unemployment rate levels that trigger on each new tier of PBD largely follow the recommendations of Dube 2021.

Triggers-off proposal

In addition to making UI benefit extensions quickly responsive to downturns, we also propose reforms aimed at keeping PBDs from falling during those periods when overall unemployment is stabilizing or declining for the “wrong” reason—when people have stopped their active job search and are dropping out of official counts of the labor force, and so are not counted as unemployed.14 To ensure that higher tiers of PBD only trigger off when unemployment rates are declining and those declines are driven by rising employment, we propose adding a second (necessary but not sufficient) trigger-off that requires a 0.2 percentage-point reduction in a state’s prime-age employment-to-population ratio (the share of the population ages 25 to 54 with a job).

So, for example, say that the state and national unemployment rate falls from 8% to 7% (and assume the alternative triggers-on don’t apply in this situation because the state and national economies entered the recession with a relatively high unemployment rate). All else being equal, this would lead to a reduction in PBD from 72 to 59 weeks according to Table 4.1. But, if over the last three months the prime-age EPOP averages a level that shows no improvement (or an improvement of only 0.1 percentage points) when compared with the prior (nonoverlapping) three-month period, then the PBD will remain at 72 weeks. Only when the unemployment rate is below 8% and there has been a 0.2 percentage-point improvement in the nonoverlapping three-month average of prime-age EPOPs will the PBD slide down to a lower tier. This same 0.2 percentage-point improvement is needed each time the unemployment rate falls far enough to push PBDs down to another tier. Because it is a necessary condition over and above improvements in unemployment, we refer to the required prime-age EPOP improvement as a “failsafe” condition.

The usefulness of this approach to making triggers automatic can be seen during and after the Great Recession. If these triggers had been in place, 37 states in 2014 and 2015 would have continued to have at least some tier of extended benefits in place rather than having all benefit extensions cut off at the end of 2013, when Congress forced them to lapse.

The prime-age EPOP failsafe would have been useful in this time as well. Nationally, the unemployment rate fell by a full percentage point (from 9.9% to 8.8%) between April 2010 and October 2011. All else being equal, this would lead to a reduction in PBD in the current proposal. But, over this same period, the prime-age EPOP actually fell by 0.3 percentage points. If the unemployment rate falls even as employment declines, this means by definition that all of the “improvement” in the unemployment rate was driven by reductions in the labor force participation rate—a reduction which itself was largely caused by the depressed labor market. A prime-age EPOP failsafe would keep PBD from falling in this situation.

Policy proposal: Improve data sources

Currently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not calculate state-level prime-age EPOPs that are measured precisely enough to make the PBD determinations we recommend. Accordingly, part of our policy proposal is a requirement that the BLS adds a prime-age EPOP measure to its monthly Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS). This should be easily within its existing capability and resources.

A related and even more pressing data enhancement needed to establish useful triggers for extending UI benefit duration would be the ability to better measure group-specific unemployment rates. It is well-known that state-level unemployment rates calculated for particular racial or ethnic groups or even educational groups are inaccurate and change a great deal from month to month because household surveys do not reach enough members of the affected groups.15 Further, declining response rates among some racial and ethnic groups are actually making these household surveys even less useful in calculating group-specific labor market outcomes (Baker and Cai 2021).

Despite this measurement problem, significant evidence shows that workers of color often are still struggling to find work even as the economy overall recovers from recessions.16 There is a clear fairness argument for providing better ways to calculate group-specific employment rates: Our economic policy should be designed to improve the labor market experiences of all demographic groups, not just those who are quickest to recover. There is also an economic argument. Often those workers recovering fastest in the wake of economic downturns are white and college-educated workers who tend to have higher incomes and wealth than those still experiencing high unemployment. Improving labor market outcomes for more advantaged groups can conceal the continuing need to support poorer households who need it most. Cutting off benefits too soon for poorer families also slows the economic recovery, as they are usually the most apt to spend (Bivens 2017).

Ideally, we would measure group-specific unemployment rates finely enough to require that all (or at least most) group-specific unemployment rates declined before triggering off an extended tier of PBDs. Because today’s statistical infrastructure does not allow measures that are precise or timely enough to make these requirements reasonable, we further call on the BLS to expand the sample size of existing household surveys and explore other measures to ensure reliable, real-time data on labor market outcomes at much finer levels of geographic and group-specific detail.

Finally, we call for higher-quality and more finely disaggregated collection of data within the UI system. One promising avenue to construct group-specific triggers could be to use “exit rates” from UI receipt to employment, to determine the pace of needed labor market improvement. The existing data on UI recipients is plagued with a host of deficiencies and challenges that would currently make this impossible (see, for example, Cajner et al. 2020). Fixing this data collection is vital not only for a number of needed policy reforms but also for construction of even better benefits on- and off-triggers in the future.

Endnotes

1. Authors’ analysis of the data underlying Figure 4B referenced later in this chapter.

2. See Farooq, Kugler, and Muratori 2020 for evidence that longer UI benefit durations can increase the quality of a job match.

3. The social insurance function of UI essentially works as a substitute for other instruments that can help laid-off workers smooth consumption over a spell of job loss, the most obvious other instrument being private wealth. Given that holdings of private wealth are highly unequal, and that households with less education or headed by historically discriminated-against groups have less private wealth, it stands to reason that these groups will be most in need of an alternative instrument to private wealth (like UI) for maintaining consumption over a spell of job loss.

4. Whittaker and Isaacs (2019) include a list of the states with benefit durations of less than 26 weeks in the pre-COVID period.

5. As of early May, the Tennessee General Assembly had approved cutting unemployment eligibility weeks.

6. See Chodorow-Reich and Coglianese 2019 for this finding that regular UI benefits provide the majority of fiscal impulse (when combined with extended benefits), even during steep recessions.

7. See McHugh and Kimball 2015 for evidence on low-duration states seeing lower recipiency rates overall. Some of this correlation is clearly related to other factors: The reduced PBDs are obviously a sign of state government indifference or hostility to effective UI benefits generally, and so likely are accompanied by other aspects of the UI system (eligibility requirements or administrative features) that also reduce recipiency. But, as described in the main text, there are also independent causal effects running from reduced PBD to lower recipiency.

8. Anderson and Meyer 1997 provide evidence that lower benefit durations reduce takeup rates. The generosity of benefit levels matters the most for take-up rates.

9. For a list of states with the respective triggers, see U.S. DOL-ETA 2021a.

10. Mastri, Vroman, Needels, and Nicholson (2015) note that states were encouraged to adopt total unemployment rate triggers during the Great Recession because the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided 100% of EB financing. They find that adopting these triggers resulted in much-higher first EB payments (or number of new UI enrollees under the EB program).

11. See Lake 2002 for a history of these provisions.

12. See Kaverman and Stettner 2021 for how such delays harmed UI recipients when benefits lapsed in January 2021.

13. A particular target of Republican governors was the $300 in enhanced benefits included in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (enhanced weekly UI benefits initially enacted under the CARES Act totaled $600 but were allowed to lapse in August 2020). For more on the controversial governors’ attacks on the emergency benefits, see Adamczyk 2021.

14. Traditional unemployment measures estimate the share of individuals looking for work who cannot find it. In contrast, labor force participation measures the overall share of the population that is working. Severe economic conditions can lead to some potential workers giving up on finding work, leading to a measured drop in unemployment that does not reflect an actual improvement in economic conditions.

15. For example, in a recent estimate of unemployment rates by state and race, Moore (2021) finds that over half of states lack a sufficient sample size to reliably calculate the Black unemployment rate.

16. See, for example, Cajner et al. 2017.

17. It is true that some papers, notably that by Hagedorn, Karahan, Manovskii, and Mitman (2015) find large effects, but as Boone et al. (2021) explain, that study has at least three substantial methodological problems.

References

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Reforming Unemployment Insurance

• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Primer
• Statement of the problem
• Section 1. Universal standards
• Section 2. Financing
• Section 3. Eligibility
• Section 4. Benefit Duration
• Section 5. Benefit levels
• Appendix

The table below summarizes key proposals under the five priority recommendations for urgent interventions to ensure that the unemployment insurance system can sustain families and the economy. A subset of these proposals are highlighted in the Executive Summary. Individual chapters in the report discuss these policies in detail and provide additional important reforms.

Foreword • Authors • Acknowledgements

A joint project of Center for American Progress, Center for Popular Democracy, Economic Policy Institute, Groundwork Collaborative, National Employment Law Project, National Women’s Law Center, and Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

Foreword

Heeding the voices of workers rising up to fix a system that failed us

If nothing else, COVID-19 has taught us that if we don’t make bold changes to our nation’s economic and social foundation now, we could squander our best chance to save our economy from tanking in the next decade. We workers are that foundation, and this crisis has revealed fissures in that foundation that have been expanding for the past half-century.

I’m a Black Native American woman who just turned 60. I’m also an award-winning former broadcast and print journalist. My 40-year-plus career path has been obstructed by workplace abuse, systemic discrimination, racial and gender bias, wage suppression, and now ageism. I was already way behind the eight ball when the pandemic struck. And now I am unemployed.

Latrish Oseko and Dora Whitfield have faced similar obstacles. I learned Latrish’s and Dora’s stories through our leadership in a movement of unemployed workers. While Dora, Latrish and I established our careers in different industries and live in different states, we have faced the same insidious race and gender biases in our workplaces—and the same challenges in rejoining the ranks of the employed. Our unemployment experiences support the problems flagged in this report: that people of color, especially African Americans, represent a historically disproportionately large percentage of COVID-unemployed workers, and are least likely to get the benefits we need to get back on our feet. We’re the last hired, first fired, and the last rehired.

At the end of 2019, I was freelancing and about to start training for my second year with the U.S. Census Bureau when I clinched a remote long-term freelance opportunity providing content strategy to the University of Maryland. It was the next break I needed.

Then COVID-19 hit. I knew the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act provided Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), the federal program bringing jobless aid to workers ineligible for traditional UI. For the first time, the UI system offered benefits for nontraditional “1099 workers” like me. Without this temporary assistance, I, and millions of other workers, would have been without any financial support this past year. That’s why this report recommends that all workers, including contract, gig, and self-employed workers, be permanently eligible for some form of UI benefits.

Having been on Medicaid and food stamps in the past, I know how easy it is to answer an application question wrongly and be disqualified. My PUA application was approved and processed by early May. But without warning, the benefits stopped. I searched Facebook for groups that were sharing UI application information. I found one: “Georgia Unemployment Issues—COVID-19.” Our members included newly jobless people from all sectors. We had unintentionally joined a burgeoning national movement of people engaged in mutual aid and activism to improve a dysfunctional UI system.

Things got much, much worse after the additional $600 weekly benefits provided by the federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (PUC) program ended July 31. More and more of our Facebook group members shared their heartbreaking stories of pending evictions, food insecurity, lost medical insurance, repossessed cars, and declining mental health. While the PUC program was extended at a lower weekly benefit level of $300 after a lapse of several months, it didn’t provide enough help for people falling further and further behind.

Coping with inadequate and unreliable benefits even in normal times is a familiar story for many workers. Louisiana, for example, provides notoriously stingy benefits. States with higher Black populations tend to have shorter benefit durations and less generous benefits. In these states, which tend to be in the South, many jobs are low-wage jobs and low benefits serve to force Black workers into those low-paying jobs. It’s one reason why they pay benefits that are way below the cost of living. It’s a big reason why we need federal standards.

Dora Whitfield had worked for 30 years in the New Orleans hospitality industry. She’s not well-to-do, but as a union member she enjoyed a stable income—enough to purchase her first home in 2014. Then the pandemic pulled the rug from under her. Her employer reduced her hours to part time until she was furloughed this past September.

Dora, a member of Step Up Louisiana, a community organization that organizes for economic and education justice, had never been on unemployment. She received the state’s maximum UI benefit of $247 a week, $221 after taxes.

“$247 a week?! Do you know I make that much money in tips when I work on a weekend? That’s on top of my regular paycheck,” she says. “When you have $221, it’s like you’re playing Russian Roulette. You have one bullet in your gun. And you have your light bill here, your water bill here, your car insurance, and then you might have your house note. So, wherever you shoot that bullet, that’s when you have to decide what bill you’re gonna pay.”

In Delaware, Latrish Oseko’s company began reducing its contract workers’ hours to part time in March. By May, all contractors were laid off, leaving Latrish, her live-in boyfriend, and their 4-year-old daughter solely dependent on his income. She lost her job the same month her landlord decided to evict her family. Despite their search for new housing, they hit the same wall millions of jobless Americans have encountered.

“We applied everywhere but we couldn’t get an apartment to save our lives because no one would accept us on my boyfriend’s measly income at the college and they would not accept my unemployment as income,” she explains.

They landed in Motel 6, spending more than $2,500 a month. The weekly PUC benefits she had saved kept a roof over their heads, but her savings dwindled quickly. Latrish’s boyfriend worked a job that put him at high risk for infection. His exposure forced the family to quarantine six times. Eventually, he contracted the virus. Latrish withdrew her daughter from day care, further frustrating her job search and causing another hit to the family’s income.

“We’re in a no-win situation,” she adds, noting that her current benefit amounts don’t cover her cost of living.

Dora and Latrish’s stories show that the unemployment system can be a literal lifeline, as when it kept Latrish’s family from living on the street. But far more often, UI fails working people—especially Black women like us. When UI is too stingy or unavailable due to narrow eligibility, millions of working people are either struggling to just survive, or forced to take work that is underpaid, unsafe, and offers no stability.

Employer lobby groups have persuaded governors around the country to withhold federal UI benefits because they refuse to raise wages or job quality to attract job seekers. Instead, they prop up a system that coerces us into jobs that pay below the cost of living and require working multiple jobs, consuming all our waking hours with no guarantee of steady hours or income. Without a federal right to unemployment benefits and the other recommendations in this report, many workers in this country will be trapped in a cycle of poverty and economic stress that, quite literally, is killing them.

In short, good jobs—jobs that allow us to live in dignity and security—aren’t available to a large swath of the American workforce. Before the pandemic, good paying jobs were hard to find after the Great Recession. Now, as post-pandemic recovery looms on the horizon, a weary workforce can’t afford more cuts in wages and stability.

Yet, we, the COVID-unemployed, have been accused of choosing a UI-benefits-based lifestyle instead of rejoining the workforce. Our answer to that narrative is a resounding “no!” We simply want work that pays wages and salaries that cover the rising cost of living. We want to grow in our aptitude, talents, and skills, and use them as they should be used—to make a reasonable living. Instead, we are being asked to accept a form of financial abuse by accepting work that traps us in a cycle of poverty and stagnation. So, we are pushing back. It’s that simple.

Our firsthand experiences underscore why this report proposes federal benefits standards to make sure benefits are enough to survive on. Our experiences show why we need a dependent allowance of $35 per week. They demonstrate why we need automatic triggers to extend benefits up to 99 weeks when the true unemployment rate increases.

These critical reforms would not only save vulnerable households but also protect the economy. Finally, the universality of our experiences underscores the need to finance unemployment benefits with federal taxes, not state ones, and ensure our access to benefits is not subject to the whim of state officials.

The obstacles we’ve faced are why we got involved in organizing for economic and racial justice. The proposals here were developed in collaboration and consultation with Latrish, Dora, me, and other workers like us. We need a better foundation for our economy. A reformed unemployment system with federal standards that ensure equity, efficiency, and stability can reinforce our weakened foundation. A well-crafted policy structure of fairness that is baked into the framework will provide a sturdy rebar system that benefits and empowers all workers.

—Sharon Shelton Corpening, Roswell, Georgia

Authors

Organizations noted for identification purposes only

Josh Bivens (Economic Policy Institute), Melissa Boteach (National Women’s Law Center), Rachel Deutsch (Center for Popular Democracy), Francisco Díez (Center for Popular Democracy), Rebecca Dixon (National Employment Law Project), Brian Galle (Georgetown University Law Center), Alix Gould-Werth (Washington Center for Equitable Growth), Nicole Marquez (National Employment Law Project), Lily Roberts (Center for American Progress), Heidi Shierholz (Economic Policy Institute), William Spriggs (AFL-CIO and Howard University), and Andrew Stettner (The Century Foundation)

Acknowledgments

The contributors and sponsoring organizations also appreciate the engagement and constructive feedback from key stakeholder organizations, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), and UNITE HERE.

Lora Engdahl’s tireless and insightful editing made this report possible. We are grateful for all of the work Amee Chew provided throughout the drafting of this report. Doug Steiger provided outstanding support in drafting and editing. Elizabeth Pancotti and Kitty Richards were invaluable before departing for government service. Key legal analysis and feedback on the challenges facing workers came from Julia Simon-Mishel. Don Rhodes and Cornelius Cornish Jr. provided critical fact-checking assistance; Barbara Karni and Teresa Kroeger provided editing assistance; John Carlo Mandapat, Daniel Perez, and Eric Shansby assisted with layout and design; and Colleen O’Neill provided a final proofread.

The members and leaders of Unemployed Action, a project of the Center for Popular Democracy, provided invaluable influence, input, and insights on their experience of the UI system. This report would not have been possible without them, and many of the recommendations wouldn’t have been possible without their perspectives and organizing. We’re grateful for the aid provided by Gus Leinbach and Arpan Patel in helping facilitate this process. This would not have been possible without the workers and worker-leaders who took part in the series of workshops that took place over two months and provided critical influence, feedback, and input on the policy to the authors. Similarly, staff and members of the following organizations were heavily involved in that process, including Benjamin Zucker, Gabrielle Bolden-Shaw, and Caleb Holmes of Step Up Louisiana; Lalo Montoya of Make the Road Nevada; Emily Dhatt and Sage Wilson of Working Washington; Claire Galpern of One PA; Nicole Fears-Washington, Klaire Gumbs, and Eric Robertson of the New Georgia Project; and Kalia Johnson and Molly Shack of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative.

We also thank the many individuals who took time to provide us with feedback on the full report or on individual chapters (organizations noted for identification purposes only):

David E. Balducchi (U.S. Department of Labor, retired), Lauren Bauer (Brookings Institution), Alex Camardelle (Georgia Budget and Policy Institute), Jaya Chatterjee (SEIU), Cecelie Counts (AFL-CIO), Martha Coven (Princeton School of Public and International Affairs), Mia Dell (SEIU), Indivar Dutta-Gupta (Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality), Wendy Edelberg (Brookings Institution), Kathryn Anne Edwards (Rand Corp.), Michael Graetz (Columbia Law School), Kali Grant (Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality), Steve Gray (National Employment Law Project), Monica Halas (Greater Boston Legal Services), Sarah David Heydemann (National Women’s Law Center), Hilary Hoynes (University of California, Berkeley), Alex Jacquez, Andrew Johnston (University of California, Merced), Sowmya Kypa (SEIU), Marty Leary (UNITE HERE), Sharit Cardenas Lopez (SEIU), Rachel Lyons (UFCW), Elaine Maag (Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center), David Madland (Center for American Progress), Rachel Melendes (UNITE HERE), Michael Miller (U.S. Department of Labor, retired), Gwen Mills (UNITE HERE), Shaun O’Brien (AFSCME), Robert Pavosevich (U.S. Department of Labor, retired), Matt Pearce (Media Guild of the West), David Ratner (Federal Reserve), Kelly Ross (AFL-CIO), Jesse Rothstein (University of California, Berkeley), Carrie Sallgren (UNITE HERE), Zach Schiller (Policy Matters Ohio), Garrett Andrew Schneider (SEIU), Paul Schwalb (UNITE HERE), Alexa Tapia (National Employment Law Project), Wayne Vroman (Urban Institute), and George Wentworth (National Employment Law Project).

Suggested citation

Bivens, Josh, Melissa Boteach, Rachel Deutsch, Francisco Diez, Rebecca Dixon, Brian Galle, Alix Gould-Werth, Nicole Marquez, Lily Roberts, Heidi Shierholz, William Spriggs, and Andrew Stettner. 2021. Reforming Unemployment Insurance: Stabilizing a System in Crisis and Laying the Foundation for Equity. A joint report of the Center for American Progress, Center for Popular Democracy, Economic Policy Institute, Groundwork Collaborative, National Employment Law Project, National Women’s Law Center, and Washington Center for Equitable Growth. June 2021.