Labor issues stood out among a long roster of pressing business considerations the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development discussed at a pre-session meeting Thursday.
“Nobody’s going to make any money without a good labor market,” committee chair Bill Botzow, D-Bennington, said.
The committee met to hear legislative requests from several agencies and to discuss their priorities for the second half of the legislative biennium, which starts in January.
Unemployment insurance and workforce development loom large on the horizon.
Unemployment insurance
Vermont restructured the way it finances unemployment insurance in 2010, when it joined many other states in taking a federal loan to bail out its Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund. The $77.7 million loan was paid off in July — two years ahead of schedule.
But that doesn’t mean the UI trust fund, from which unemployment benefits are paid, is considered universally “solvent.”
Botzow distinguished between two versions of the term: broadly or narrowly defined. He said he thinks the state has a good sense of the broader solvency issues for the trust fund.
“The narrower part, where you can start making choices and changes … it needs to emerge,” he said. “I know there are pressures from various interests, (whether) it be suitable or unsuitable for change.”
Business and labor constituencies are expected to hash out their differences in 2014 over which direction the trust fund should go — restoring some benefits for workers, or giving back some slack to businesses that pay into the fund.
Before workers can collect unemployment compensation, most are laid off. And only sometimes are they — or the state — given much notice.
Erika Wolffing, assistant to the commissioner of the Department of Labor, said there’s been some discussion of establishing a state law that requires more warning from large employers before they lay off employees. The federal WARN Act requires 60 days notice before mass layoffs, and some states have instituted stricter mandates and penalties.
“We’re finding that federal requirements are a little bit weak,” Wolffing said.
The state’s Department of Labor will likely come before the committee this session to discuss what can be done to strengthen state layoff laws.
Workforce development
Gov. Peter Shumlin stated at an unrelated news conference Tuesday that employers tell him good jobs are going vacant. That’s better than the problem of layoffs during the depths of the recession, Shumlin said.
But it’s an issue that Rep. Michelle Kupersmith, D-South Burlington, said the state may have just as hard a time fixing. Kupersmith has been at the forefront of a work group the Legislature created in 2013 to address workforce development needs.
She said weaknesses in Vermont’s network of workforce development programs starts with a lack of information.
“We simply don’t have the expertise to know what we should be doing for our citizens as well as our businesses,” Kupersmith said. She said both the Legislature and the executive agencies need more capacity to address workforce development and training issues.
Some programs are working, she said, such as technical training for adults. But similar programs for kids run into regulatory barriers, especially surrounding liability for young people working with heavy equipment.
Overall, Kupersmith reported, technical centers are an “underutilized resource” for workforce training, as are internship programs.
Yet with disconnected data gathering among all the programs, Kupersmith said in an interview following the meeting, it’s hard to really track their reach and effectiveness.
Disconnection was not an uncommon topic: Botzow complained that statutorily, there is no clear or consistently applied definition of what constitutes a “hire” when job placement programs boast about their success rates. He said similar ambiguity plagues discussions of “temporary” workers.
“How people actually work and how people hire is becoming much more fluid,” Botzow noted. Along with a host of other human resources considerations, he said those are definitions that need to be better understood.
Botzow closed by exhorting the committee members not to lock themselves into an agenda, but to weigh competing priorities against realistic limits of time and money.
That said, the committee’s priorities — which are still being finalized — need action, he underscored.
“We can’t just have good conversations,” Botzow said.
He added that, given the seniority of most committee members, his expectations are high.
