Minimum Wage, Paid Leave, and Unemployment
Friends -
Progressives have long championed economic justice policy ideas like raising the minimum wage, creating paid leave and strengthening our unemployment system. While some of these policy issues received significant attention by the legislature in years past, this session we’ve seen less attention given to these transformative policy ideas that benefit workers. That’s why we’re glad to see both a long overdue minimum wage increase ($15/hour by 2024), creation of a paid leave program, and improvements to our unemployment system included in the latest version of H.159 - an economic development and workforce revitalization bill.
We don’t know yet how these provisions will be supported or changed as H.159 continues to move through committees, but we ask you to join us in making sure that legislators working on this bill know how important these issues are, both to pandemic economic recovery, but also in moving forward to an economy that works for all people.
The pandemic highlighted the need for a paid leave program more than ever. The paid leave provision of this bill creates two policy approaches: a taskforce to develop an equitable and affordable paid family and medical leave insurance program that considers universal and voluntary models and a COVID-19 Related Paid Leave Grant Program. The COVID-19 leave program is made possible through ARPA funding and would cover an employee who has been diagnosed with COVID-19, experienced exposure, or has symptoms. It also covers caring for family members for pandemic related reasons such as illness or school closures.
During the pandemic, we saw a record number of people apply for unemployment revealing many of the pre-existing complexities and limitations of our unemployment system. Last session the legislature passed legislation to provide significant unemployment tax relief for employers to relieve them of the burden of quickly refilling the depleted unemployment trust fund. The legislation also included increasing the weekly claim for people using employment by $25/week when federal pandemic unemployment benefits ended in September 2021. However, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a ruling that this claim increase was not an allowable use of unemployment trust fund dollars and prevented the state from implementing it. H.159 provides a new way to fund the claim increase separate from the trust fund. Unfortunately it will not be retroactive, but it will provide much needed support for people on unemployment.
Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak will be looking to do more to improve the unemployment aspects of H.159 this session. She introduced a bill this session to create an Unemployment Insurance Advocate Office (H.616). This office would be independent of the Department of Labor and support Vermonters navigating the complex unemployment system to access their claims. Claimants would be able to access a free advocate to advise them during a claim appeal, seek support in understanding an overpayment issue, and receive assistance in understanding DOL communication. The Office would also be empowered to review current laws, rules and procedures, to identify potential improvements and changes to the legislature and DOL. There is growing support for this Advocate Office from the DOL, as well as the possibility of a federal grant to establish this office.
Another bill sponsored by Rep. Mulvaney-Stanak (H.239) would further strengthen the unemployment system by improving language access for claimants whose primary language is not English, expanding the unemployment system to cover self-employed individuals as the federal government allowed during the pandemic, and studying extending unemployment to gig economy workers. Now is a critical time to make unemployment more equitable and more efficient and H.159 is the vehicle to add these important provisions.
Progressives in the Media:
Rep. Mollie S. Burke: Burke & Coffey: Supporting better outcomes for Vermont's children - VTDigger
Rep. Taylor Small: Celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility: from role models to gender affirming supplies
Rep. Tanya Vyhovsky: Painful to watch what's happening in my family's homeland - VTDigger
