Photo courtesy of WV Legislative Photography A member of the House Finance Committee reads Senate Bill 841 Monday, making changes to West Virginia’s unemployment system.

CHARLESTON – Members of a West Virginia House of Delegates committee signed on to a state Senate bill making changes to unemployment benefits. But opponents believe it could end up adding to the state’s already poor labor force participation rate.

The House Finance Committee recommended Senate Bill 841 – setting the amount of unemployment taxes and benefits – for passage Monday evening after more than three hours of discussion, sending the bill to the full House for consideration.

The bill’s original goal was to increase what employers pay into the state’s unemployment trust fund from $8,000 to $10,000 per employee. But the Senate amended the bill last week to include a version of a bill making changes to the number of weeks for unemployment benefits and the amount of weekly benefits.

The Senate changed the structure of its unemployment bill in an amendment last week. While a previous version would have indexed the number of allowable weeks of benefits to the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, SB 841 would increase the dollar amount of weekly benefits for the first four weeks of unemployment, dropping the dollar amount every four weeks thereafter.

During the first four weeks of unemployment, a person would receive a weekly benefit rate of 70% of the individual’s average weekly wage, dropping by 5% every four weeks. Current law sets the weekly unemployment benefit at 66.7% of the individual prior average weekly wage.

The bill would reduce the number of total weeks of unemployment from 26 weeks to 24 weeks. The bill would also allow an individual on unemployment to accept a part-time job while collecting unemployment as long as their part-time wages are less than their weekly unemployment benefit.

Supporters of the bill see it as a way to create long-term stability for the state’s unemployment trust fund. Like all states during the COVID-19 pandemic, West Virginia’s trust fund took a major hit when non-essential businesses were forced to close for nearly two months in the spring of 2020 to slow the spread of the coronavirus. At one point, the state’s unemployment rate spiked to 15.8%, putting severe strain on the resources of West Virginia’s workforce.

But since then, the unemployment trust fund has recovered and stabilized, sitting at more than $390 million currently. Officials with Workforce West Virginia testified Monday that the trust fund could survive for 91 weeks with a 10% unemployment rate before being depleted.

According to Workforce West Virginia, the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for January was 4.3%, up from an all-time low of 3.5% in February, March, and April of last year. That number is expected to rise over the next few months upon the news of massive layoffs by employers in central West Virginia and the Northern Panhandle.

According to the West Virginia Center for Budget and Policy – ​​a think tank that focuses on poverty, labor issues, and tax policy – ​​a person receiving unemployment benefits in the state receives an average of 13 weeks of benefits before finding full-time employment.

One of the things the bill does is expand the number of work search requirements someone on employment must complete on a weekly basis. Currently, Workforce West Virginia requires unemployment recipients to submit weekly work search efforts.

SB 841 would require a person on unemployment to conduct at least four work search activities weekly out of a total of 10 available activities. These activities include: registering to work with the labor exchange, placement firms, temp agencies, or educational institutions; logging onto the state labor exchange or other online job matching websites; using reemployment services; completing job applications with employers expected to have job openings; and applying for and participating in employment and training services.

Other activities include participating in work-related networking events, such as job fairs; making contact with employers expected to have job openings; taking the civil service exam; doing in-person or virtual job interviews; or any other work search activity allowed by Workforce West Virginia.

Seth DiStefano, the policy outreach director at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, believes the new work search requirements will be onerous and difficult to complete by some unemployed recipients.

“One of the more problematic pieces of the unemployment bill, Senate Bill 841, is just the amount of red tape,” DiStefano said. “People, even in counties with very sparse employment opportunities, are going to be forced to prove to Workforce that they have applied for four jobs every single week as a means of holding onto earned benefits. That is very problematic in places like Clay County where, according to Workforce’s own information, there’s like one job available.”

DiStefano said the bill creates a one-size-fits-all job search requirement that doesn’t take into account regional differences in the availability of full-time jobs, especially in rural parts of the state where jobs are not as plentiful as they are in more urban parts of the state or regions of the state seeing a renaissance in manufacturing.

“I live in downtown Charleston. If I lost my job today, there are four jobs a week for me to apply for here,” DiStefano said. “That’s not the case in my home county in Randolph County. In Randolph, Pocahontas, and some of your more rural counties – especially now with the closure of Allegheny Wood Products – you’re telling them that to hold on to modest benefits that pay for car payments and take care of house payments they must be dependent on on applying for jobs that simply aren’t fair.”

The additional required work search requirements could make it harder for unemployment recipients to comply with depending on how those reports are required, DiStefano said. Poor broadband access in parts of the state could make it difficult to access a web portal to show compliance. Some recipients might have to travel to regional Workforce West Virginia offices, taking time away from searching for jobs.

“If you’re going to force people to prove on a weekly basis that they are keeping up with four work search applications per week, that’s a lot of work both on the department and the individual,” DiStefano said. “For a lot of people it’s just going to be too much from a red tape perspective.”

Buried in the amended bill is a new requirement for employers to report the refusal of any recipient of unemployment benefits to accept an offer of employment through a job referral from Workforce West Virginia to the commissioner of Workforce West Virginia.

“Now, if this bill becomes law, there’s going to be an extra hoop for employers to jump through,” DiStefano said. “If I were an employer, I wouldn’t be happy about that part right there. What if somebody makes a mistake and reports somebody to the commissioner and it turns out that signals got crossed? What kind of liability does that mean for employers?”

In the section of the bill allowing unemployed recipients to work part-time jobs while on unemployment, the bill also mentions the recipient receiving referrals for part-time jobs from Workforce West Virginia. DiStefano said Workforce West Virginia should be focused on helping people attain full-time work, not becoming a temp service.

“I don’t think Workforce should be in the business of trying to put people into part-time work,” DiStefano said. “West Virginia’s workforce should be in the business of getting people into stable, solid careers.”

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