Credit voters for new effort to reform jobless system
Sunday, April 27, 2003 10:17 AM PDT
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E-mail this articleBoeing, retailers, the building industry and small businesses last week took a big step toward making Washington more employer-friendly. They all signed off on a new plan to reform the state's burdensome unemployment insurance system.
As significant as this agreement among factions within Washington's business community is, it's only the first round of what promises to be hard-fought negotiations.
Representatives of labor open the next round. Those negotiations will make or break the reform. No proposal stands a chance of approval in both the Republican-controlled Senate and Democrat-controlled House without the signatures of both business and labor.
Still, the business community's announced agreement is an encouraging first step.
Thank Washington voters for keeping the pressure on all factions of the business community to start down this road toward meaningful reform. Last fall's referendum vote to throw out a flawed reform bill kept the whole business community focused on reform.
That legislation improved the unemployment system only for those businesses with the greatest political clout. It would have "fixed" the state's costly system by merely shifting costs.
Boeing, the principle backer of the legislation, would have seen its unemployment insurance rates decline by some $16 million over the next three years. Washington homebuilders and many small businesses would have seen their rates jump at total of $30 million over the same three-year span.
That cost-shifting didn't qualify as reform. This new plan does. It tries to get at what everyone agrees is making Washington such a hard place to do business -- the high rates everyone is made to pay to prop up one of the most generous unemployment benefit systems in the nation.
Washington's system is two and a half times more costly than the national average. It is the second most-expensive in the country. The state ranks first in the nation in the length of time workers collect jobless benefits.
This is a system that effectively creates unemployment. Making it more business-friendly will help keep existing jobs in Washington and attract new employers.
Business and labor representatives need to stay at it until they produce the needed reform.
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