California already doesn’t have the funds for to pay for advantages for unemployed employees. So why would the Legislature even take into consideration giving advantages to employees who select to go on strike?
Gov. Gavin Newsom ought to veto SB 799 and restrict unemployment checks to employees who’re out of labor via no fault of their very own. If unions need to assist employees pay their payments throughout a strike, they need to enhance their strike fund finances. It’s not like they don’t have the cash. Labor spent an estimated $1.8 billion on election campaigning in america in 2020.
Increasing unemployment advantages to hanging employees is in impact passing a tax enhance on employers, as a result of they fund this system.
The laws would offer unemployment advantages to hanging employees when a strike goes on for greater than two weeks. People who find themselves eligible for unemployment in California obtain a weekly cost of $450 for a most of 26 weeks.
Past the fundamental precept of paying advantages to employees who select to go on strike, California already owes $18 billion to the federal authorities for cash it borrowed to pay unemployment advantages through the pandemic. In line with the Related Press, state officers estimate that it’s going to take 10 years to repay that debt.
On prime of that, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Workplace studies that the state estimates that this 12 months unemployment advantages funds will exceed tax collections by $1.1 billion, the primary time that has occurred throughout a interval of job progress. Ought to a recession happen, that quantity would develop considerably.
California may have paid down a few of that debt with the cash it obtained from the federal authorities through the pandemic. However the state as a substitute selected to spend almost $10 billion on rebates for California taxpayers.
It’s tough to find out how a lot extra cash SB 799 would price the state, given the unpredictable nature of the quantity and size of union strikes. An analyst for the Meeting Appropriations Committee put the worth tag at between “low hundreds of thousands to tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.” Labor strikes are on the rise this 12 months, in response to information from the Cornell ILR Faculty Labor Motion Tracker. Its newest report reveals that greater than 200 strikes have taken place in america to this point in 2023, involving greater than 300,000 employees. That compares to solely 116 strikes and 27,000 employees over the identical interval in 2021.
The governor is going through heavy stress from labor to signal the invoice, provided that 1000’s of Hollywood screenwriters have been on strike since Might 2.
Solely two states — New York and New Jersey — enable hanging employees to gather unemployment advantages. Newsom ought to use his veto to forestall California from turning into the third.
