A requirement that laid-off workers must actively seek work if they want to qualify for unemployment benefits is being reinstated, Labor Commissioner Michael Harrington announced at Gov. Phil Scott’s press conference Tuesday.
The work-search requirement was suspended after Covid-19 entered Vermont last March, battering the state’s economy. But now, with a growing number of Vermonters receiving Covid-19 vaccinations and the state making plans to reopen the economy, “this means more opportunities for Vermonters to return to work,” Harrington said.
As of May 9, people still collecting unemployment benefits will be required to conduct a standard work search every week.
However, “as with most things related to the pandemic, this is not a simple activity, and one size does not fit all,” Harrington said, and the rules will be clarified later this week.
A valid work search consists of three “formal job inquiries” every week in the eyes of the labor department. Application submissions, requests for interviews via email or phone, and interviews themselves — both virtual or in-person — all count as employment outreach, Harrington said.
To keep receiving benefits, claimants must report “job contacts” to the department the week after making those contacts, Harrington said, and should do so through the labor department’s online portal.
Vermonters with special health circumstances will remain exempt from the work-search requirement, Harrington said. They include people who must remain at home to care for a loved one, people with preexisting health conditions that put them at risk of infection, and parents with children learning remotely. Vermonters on federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and self-employed people are also exempt from the requirement.
Gripes from employers
The work-search announcement follows months of complaints by Vermont employers and business organizations that the pandemic has amplified the state’s longstanding labor shortage.
Businesses have decried the Legislature’s proposal to increase state-paid unemployment benefits, arguing that the combination of pandemic relief aid and lack of a work-search requirement worsened their struggle to find workers.
“We’re hearing from employers that their biggest gripe is that the workforce requirement should be reinstated, and we want people to be incentivized to go back to work,” said Cameron Wood, the labor department’s director for unemployment compensation and wages, in the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development last week.
Labor advocates counter that even Vermont’s benefits, which are higher than in many states, have left unemployed workers scraping by — and point out that national experts dispute the claim that benefits hikes disincentivize people from reentering the workforce.
On Tuesday, Scott echoed business leaders’ belief that a sweetened unemployment benefit may have prompted some unemployed workers to stay at home rather than return to jobs.
“To be perfectly blunt, there are some who are perfectly content staying on the unemployment assistance because of the $300 stipend,” Scott said at the press conference.
But he firmly rebuked a reporter’s suggestion that lack of a work-search requirement is driving employers’ recent hiring woes.
During the press conference, County Courier reporter Greg Lamoureux suggested that a business in Franklin County, which has struggled to find workers, is facing “irreparable damage” because the work search requirement had been suspended for the past year.
“I think you’re leading us in the wrong direction here,” Scott told Lamoureux. “You’re just assuming that the reason that we have a workforce shortage is because we didn’t have the work search requirement, which I just don’t agree with.”
The return of the requirement will not be a “silver bullet,” the governor said.
“We could have put the work search requirement in place from the beginning, and we’d be in the same situation today that we find ourselves in,” Scott said. “And I can’t stress this enough: We had this [employee scarcity] problem before we had the pandemic.”
Audit findings on 1099s data breach
A report from an independent consultant released on Monday found that a labor department error — which led to a massive data breach earlier this spring — was caused by a single employee’s mistake during a manual portion of 1099 tax forms’ printing process.
The office of state Auditor Doug Hoffer arranged for the consulting firm to produce the report, which Scott had requested. The data breach — which was not the first at the labor department since the pandemic began — forced the department to recall thousands of 1099 forms.
Attempts to file fraudulent unemployment claims have also hamstrung the labor department’s operations during the pandemic. Up to 80% of roughly 600 daily claims were fraudulent in early April, said Wood, the unemployment insurance director, in an interview earlier this month.
Harrington said onTuesday that claimants will notice a series of new identity-confirmation questions on the labor department’s website scattered throughout the filing process, in response to the surge of fraudulent claims.
