Report: Many states have cut unemployment benefits
A new report from the National Employment Law Project shows that many states, faced with serious budget problems, have passed laws limiting access to unemployment insurance benefits — including Michigan, of course.
“„State lawmakers enacted a range of policies in 2011 to amend their unemployment insurance (UI) programs, most of them motivated by insolvent state trust funds. Most notably, six states passed unprecedented cuts in the duration of benefits, for the first time reducing benefit weeks to less than the decades-long accepted standard of 26 weeks. In addition, states altered benefit formulas to reduce average check amounts and tightened UI eligibility requirements. In a number of states, legislators exploited the need to enact a technical fix to authorize temporary federal extensions, using it as an opportunity to extract permanent state UI program cuts. Much of the legislative debate this year was marked by open attacks on the character of workers who rely on unemployment insurance during this prolonged economic downturn.
Michigan became the first state in the nation to reduce the amount of time the jobless are eligible for state unemployment benefits in March, dropping that time from the standard 26 weeks to only 20 weeks. Democrats in the state legislature have submitted bills to restore those benefits, but have little leverage to actually get those bills passed.
