State Options for Unemployment Insurance

Unemployment insurance is a vital component of the safety net for working families, but the disparity between benefits provided by unemployment insurance programs across the states is growing. State strategies for increasing benefits include:

Increase benefit levels by indexing benefits to average weekly wages or the cost of living (COLA) index, or through dependents’ allowance.

Push Congress to eliminate the federal tax on benefits.

Push Congress to repeal the "waiting week," a state lawmaker creation in the 1980s in response to federal requirements to implement waiting weeks in order to qualify for the full federal share of Extended Benefit (EB) payments.

State strategies for increasing contingent workers’ access to benefits:

¨ Reform the "moveable base" to include more recent earnings. Moveable base reforms fix an administrative procedure which disadvantages workers with irregular earning patterns, including many women, laborers, and other contingent workers. Unemployed workers often need the earnings in the most recent quarter to be eligible for benefits. As many as six to eight percent of the unemployed are unfairly declared ineligible for benefits because of these antiquated state accounting methods.

¨ Repeal temporary help agency requirements. Several states have enacted dubious laws that require unemployed workers to re-apply through temporary help agencies if they lose jobs which they found through those agencies.

¨ Broaden the full-time work requirement for contingent workers. Often cited by welfare reform advocates as one of the most harmful and discriminatory policies facing contingent workers is the requirement that they accept full-time work in order to stay eligible to receive unemployment insurance benefits. States can adopt progressive remedies that allow contingent workers to maintain benefits if they decline full-time work for compelling family reasons.