| The representative group for the state’s largest job generator blasted the Washington Senate’s passage of SB 6885, a poisoned pill wrapped in a thin veneer of “compromise” that will only compromise the historic 2003 reforms made to the state’s unemployment insurance system.
“No wonder people are always skeptical about lawmakers’ abilities to reform anything, since after they do, they are then frog-marched by special interests into making fixes beneficial to narrow-minded lobbies,” said Carolyn Logue, state director for the 15,000-member National Federation of Independent Business NFIB/Washington, the state’s small-business advocacy group.
“The Senate chose to go with a political fix rather than a real fix to the state’s unemployment insurance system. This will slowly lead us down a path of increased UI taxes and the system’s insolvency, both of which will wreak havoc on employers and workers. We urge the State House to work in a bipartisan manner on the UI issue – unlike the Senate did. This is the only way a real solution can be adopted that will help both workers and employers in this important, but costly, system.”
Partly due to the unsustainable burden incurred by business owners, and partly due to Boeing’s threat to yank some of its production out of Washington, the Legislature made big changes to the unemployment insurance system in 2003 Up to that point, the system had been the nation’s most liberal in the amount of benefits it gave and the length of time an unemployed person could collect them. But last year, lawmakers started tinkering with their earlier work and poking holes in their changes, such as requiring the reforms contained in House Bill 2255 to be liberally construed in favor of the claimant, and benefits be calculated on the claimant’s two highest quarters of earnings.
Proponents of Senate Bill 6885, as it was passed today, are touting it as a tax cut, but Logue countered that the cost of the system is driven completely by benefits, and there can be no true tax cuts without benefit cuts. “Their claims border on consumer fraud,” she said. “In a flat economy, this bill lowers the balance of the UI Trust Fund each year, so that by 2014, the months of benefits available are decreased by 44 percent. In a recession, not only would SB 6885 reduce the savings account to less than six months of benefits, but it sets up the potential for a 28 percent tax increase the next year.”. |
