Unemployment Insurance

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Publications

Publication

Why Scaling Back Unemployment Insurance Could Harm Recovery

Key Takeaways:

  • Georgia is three days away from prematurely cutting pandemic unemployment insurance (UI). The changes will harm an estimated 347,000 Georgians and sever all UI safety net protections for 104,000 self-employed, gig-workers, and part-time workers.
  • Prematurely cutting pandemic UI threatens to erode the worker power it was meant to create by undermining leverage for livable pay and benefits in frontline low-wage industries, particularly restaurants, whose workers have historically been inadequately protected.
  • Labor market data outweighs anecdotal claims that pandemic UI has disincentivized work, as Georgians who lost jobs in Food and Accommodation, Manufacturing and Construction have left the unemployment insurance rolls faster than nearly 80 percent of jobless workers in all other industries.
Resources

Confronting the Labor Shortage Narrative and Protecting UI

  • June 3, 2021

Blogs, reports, and data to help describe current labor market conditions, address the labor shortage narrative, and discuss the need for continued UI:

Statements and blog posts responding to states pulling out of federal UI supplements:

Other potentially useful reports and data:

News Articles Mentioned:

Publication

Unemployment insurance keeps Oklahomans safe, supports the economy

Since March 15, more than 450,000 people have filed new unemployment claims in Oklahoma. These unemployment claims make up nearly 10 percent of our civilian labor force, and it means that a lot of Oklahomans are out of work. For comparison, we’ve seen more claims since mid-March than we saw in all of 2009, the year during the Great Recession that Oklahoma saw the largest number of new unemployment claims. Unemployment insurance will be a critical piece of our ability to weather and recover from this economic and public health emergency. It is in everyone’s best interest for the system to be robust and accessible to all who need it.