From Jay Fitzgerald at the Boston Herald:
The state is now paying out more money in benefits than it’s receiving in taxes from employers, Suzanne M. Bump, the state’s secretary of Labor and Workforce Development, warned yesterday…
In a worst-case scenario, the state can borrow money from the feds for cash-flow reasons if it depletes funds – something that was done during the last recession.
From Ed Vogel at the Vegas Review-Journal:
CARSON CITY — Nevada’s soaring unemployment rate will climb to a peak of 11.4 percent early next year and could force the state to ask for a federal loan to pay laid-off workers, according to an analysis released Wednesday.
With more and more laid-off workers seeking benefits, the unemployment trust fund is being depleted, and the state might have to borrow as much as $750 million from the federal government to continue paying benefits, state legislators were told…
The state of California began Monday to tap into a federal loan to cover its unemployment benefits. Unless changes are made to its system of taxing employers, the California unemployment trust fund is expected to be operating $4.9 billion in the red by the end of 2010, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Ohio was given a $500 million federal loan on Jan. 12 so that it can continue to pay laid-off workers, although its trust fund has been exhausted.
The economic stimulus package passed Wednesday by the U.S. House of Representatives includes $27 billion to continue paying laid-off workers for 33 more weeks of benefits beyond the 26 weeks available through most state programs. It also would increase jobless benefits by $25 a week and provide job training.
From wsws.org:
The wave of recent layoffs has overwhelmed the state of Michigan’s unemployment insurance system, with thousands of workers unable to get through online or by telephone to file claims. The state’s official unemployment rate reached 10.6 percent in December, the highest in the United States…
Beginning in the 1990s, Michigan closed all 43 unemployment claims offices statewide, replacing them with a telephone system for accepting unemployment claims. By 2004 half the staff of the state’s unemployment agency had been laid off. Over the last few years the Granholm administration has opened a handful of Michigan Unemployment Agency Problem Resolution offices, where workers can resolve claims issues in person. These are now swamped….
In little over a decade, the state’s unemployment reserve fund has been drained of all resources. Since 2006 the state has had to borrow money from the federal government to pay claims, and finished 2008 with $772.5 million dollars of loans due.
From Joel Dresang at the http://www.jsonline.com/business/38455484.html:
Months of rising job cuts are about to drain Wisconsin’s reserve fund for unemployment insurance, according to an audit report Tuesday.
The Legislative Audit Bureau said the employer-funded unemployment reserve is on course to be depleted next month, down from a high of $1.9?billion in June 2000…
Twenty states, including Wisconsin, are having trouble funding unemployment insurance, and six states already are borrowing from the federal government to pay benefits to laid-off workers, said Rick McHugh, Midwest coordinator for the National Employment Law Project, a group advocating for modernizing the unemployment compensation system.
From Art Pulaski at the Sacramento Bee:
The problem is, California is in danger of leaving the new federal money on the table unless the state modernizes the way it calculates who is eligible to receive unemployment benefits. Right now all states use workers’ prior earnings to determine the amount in unemployment benefits they receive. But California and some other states have an outdated system that ignores a worker’s most recent earnings when calculating eligibility for benefits…
In the past year, the national number of involuntarily part-time workers has increased by more than 40 percent – to an astounding 8 million. California’s unemployment rate is the third highest in the nation. Twenty-four counties in the state are now past the 10 percent unemployment mark.
From Kirsten Valle at the Charlotte Observer:
More than 155,900 initial claims were filed statewide last month, up 76 percent from November and nearly triple the number from December 2007, ESC records show…
The crush has squeezed the ESC’s trust fund, too, he said. It hovered around $28 million this week, down from $190.2 million Dec. 31 and almost $1 billion a decade ago. Like many other states, North Carolina will probably have to borrow money from the federal government at some point, James said…
Waits can be long in South Carolina, too. In Lancaster County, where the local unemployment rate has risen to 13.9 percent, waits at the ESC office can be as long as an hour, office director Lynda Burke said.
From Tami Luhbi at CNN:
Michigan and Rhode Island once again led the nation with the highest jobless rates at 10.6% and 10% respectively. Rhode Island’s rate is the highest in more than three decades…
Indiana and South Carolina recorded the largest monthly unemployment rate increase, at 1.1 percentage point each, while six other states had 1 percentage point jumps…
Florida is another state that’s had a rapid reverse of fortune. The Sunshine state had led the nation in job creation earlier this decade, but has now seen its employment market shrivel. The state’s rate jumped to 8.1% in December, up from 7.4% a month earlier and 4.5% a year ago. It’s now tied with Georgia for 10th highest unemployment rate in the nation…
Four more state funds — Indiana, New York, South Carolina and Ohio — have become insolvent in the last four months, according to a forthcoming report from the National Employment Law Project. They join Michigan in borrowing from the federal government to continue paying benefits.
Another 13 states are at “major risk” of insolvency, up from eight in September, according to the advocacy group. These states have eight months or less of average monthly benefits in their trust funds. These include: New Jersey, California, Kentucky, Missouri, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Idaho, Minnesota, Connecticut and Illinois.
From Emily Silva at The Pendulum:
The N.C. jobless claims Internet site which is used for posting job listings and benefits crashed two weeks ago due to the overwhelming number of people applying for new or continuing benefits…
“In the last few months, we have seen an increase from approximately 3,000 applicants per month to over 3,800,” Cummings said. “In our region [which includes Greensboro and Winston-Salem], we took over 1,000 unemployment claims in December 2007 and over 4,000 during this same period in 2008.”
Recent Comments