A Republican is working to boost jobless benefits? Wow!
Arizonans, rejoice! The Legislature is back.
Normally, the return of our leading lights to dream up hundreds of new and creative ways in which to ball things up is a signal to take cover and count the days until adjournment.
This year, however, there actually may be a chance that something good could come from the Capitol.
That Arizona’s leaders could, at long last, decide that no longer should we expect our fellow citizens to live on crumbs when they find themselves, through no fault of their own, out of a job.
“Unemployment should be one of the next big issues that we address for the people,” Rep. David Cook told me. “It’s the right thing to do.”
It is the right thing to do, given that Arizona offers the nation’s secondlowest unemployment benefit, capped at $240 a week.
It’s just surprising to hear a Republican say so, much less vow to try to do something about it.
Cook, a Republican from Globe, is working with Democratic Reps. Randy Friese of Tucson and Mitzi Epstein of Tempe on a proposal to boost the state’s unemployment benefit and make other changes aimed at helping people keep food on the table and a roof overhead until they can get back to work.
As hundreds of thousands of residents can now tell you, Arizona is a bad place to be out of work.
The state has among the highest hoops to jump through to collect unemployment and one of the lowest payouts, one that hasn’t been raised since 2004.
Only Mississippi offers less help. The federal government periodically has stepped in to help during the pandemic. But long, hard months went by with no federal help to supplement Arizona’s miserly benefit, and that added money is set to vanish this spring.
And while the pandemic will end (it will end, won’t it?), Arizona’s ridiculously low payouts will not, unless the Legislature and Gov. Doug Ducey take action.
“This is a problem in Arizona,” said Rep. Friese, who along with other Democrats has been trying to boost unemployment pay for years. “The pandemic has put a magnifying glass on this issue. We’ve been talking about this for a while and I’m so glad that Rep. Cook has reached out. In my mind this is how it’s supposed to work. This is the way government can work, a bipartisan coalition that can move this forward.”
In Arizona, the average state unemployment check is $231 a week while the national average payout is $347, according to a December 2019 study by the Grand Canyon Institute.
No surrounding state comes even close to expecting its unemployed
workers to survive on so little. In California, the average weekly unemployment pay is $329 a week. In Nevada, it’s $350. Utah’s average is $410. Colorado comes in at $430 and New Mexico at $364.
That’s assuming you qualify. Arizonans who work fewer than 30 hours a week don’t.
And if people who are drawing unemployment pick up part-time work to try to bring in at least some money — or they return to their old job with reduced hours — they are penalized. In Arizona, you can earn only $30 before the state responds with a dollar-for-dollar drop in your unemployment pay.
Earn $31 and your unemployment is reduced by $1.
Compare that to Georgia, where Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in March issued an emergency rule allowing individuals to earn $300 a week, up from the previous $55, without seeing a reduction in their weekly unemployment pay (which, by the way, averages $318 a week and is capped at $365).
“If a business opens back up slowly and their employees are returning to work with reduced hours, employers can continue to file employer-filed partial claims on behalf of their employees,” Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said, in announcing the change.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, meanwhile, has done nothing to boost Arizonans’ unemployment benefits.
Instead, he transferred $396 million of the $1.86 billion in federal coronavirus relief money he controls — money that could and should have been used to help struggling workers — to 11 state agencies that in turn will return a portion of their state funding to the state treasury.
Cook and his Democratic colleagues are not yet set on their unemployment proposal. They would need at least a few other Republicans to go along with them, given that Republicans hold a slight margin of control in the Legislature. And they’d need Ducey, which is no easy reach.
Preliminarily, they’re talking raising unemployment pay to a maximum of $350 a week, up from $240, and raising the “income disregard” — the amount you can earn before your unemployment pay is cut — to $160, up from $30.
They still are working to flesh out the numbers and how much it would cost employers, who now pay among the lowest unemployment taxes in the nation.
In Arizona, employers paid on average $148 per covered worker for state unemployment insurance in 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That's well below the national average of $277.
In Texas, for example, employers paid $220 per covered worker in 2019. For that, out-of-work Texans receive up to $521 state unemployment pay.
In Arizona, meanwhile, you'll have to make do — as Arizonans have had to do for the last 16 years — with $240 a week.
Or $6 an hour.
Anybody want to try to live on that? After the year we’ve had, anybody confident that they may not one day be forced to try to live on that?
So yeah, credit to Rep. Cook for recognizing that things need to change and be willing to reach out — gasp! — to Democrats for help in changing them.
“During COVID, the people in my district and even outside my district have contacted me about their personal issues and problems on this subject and how it affects their lives ... ” Cook told me. “They’re in a hard place of how to make ends meet, how put food on the table.
“It’s a real-life problem.”
As hundreds of thousands of residents can now tell you, Arizona is a bad place to be out of work. The state has among the highest hoops to jump through to collect unemployment and one of the lowest payouts, one that hasn’t been raised since 2004.