Strong UI Work Search Requirements Promote Re-Employment, Protect Unemployment Programs
More than one million Americans exhausted their unemployment benefits before returning to work in the past year, a remarkable figure given the roughly nine million open jobs that have remained unfilled nationwide over that same period.
Robust work search requirements in state unemployment insurance (UI) programs help facilitate a return to work, and state policymakers should consider strengthening these important requirements whenever possible.
Federal law requires unemployment claimants to be able, available, and actively seeking work in order to be eligible for weekly unemployment benefits. States have flexibility in defining acceptable work search actions and establishing the minimum number of actions that must be completed each week by a claimant.
Some states only require claimants to complete one or two work searches each week. But for a UI claimant who doesn’t have a job, the top priority needs to be finding a job.
Nebraska, Florida, Oregon, and parts of Texas require claimants to conduct five work search actions each week. Earlier this year, Tennessee started requiring claimants to conduct four work searches each week, matching the standard in Utah, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
Requiring an action is important, but it’s just as important to ensure it is meaningful and done in a productive way. States can define acceptable work search actions to include things like:
- Registering with a state job board and creating a resume
- Conducting a skills assessment to identify job eligibility and any skill training needed
- Attending a job fair and connecting directly with recruiters
- Submitting a resume for an open job
- Attending an interview
Quantifying weekly job search requirements and defining what is required go a long way toward ensuring that unemployed workers are making real progress in finding re-employment. And since the purpose of unemployment benefits is to provide temporary assistance while a person looks for work, more than one or two work search actions should be required each week.
Several states have enhanced existing work search requirements by clarifying that if a UI claimant fails (without good cause) to appear for a scheduled job interview or fails to respond to an offer of employment within a few business days, that individual is not considered to have conducted a good-faith work search for that week. Such a violation has a real consequence: a one-week suspension of unemployment benefits.
Nearly all states prohibit UI claimants from rejecting an offer of suitable employment. Turning down a job offer is proof, the reasoning goes, that a claimant no longer needs unemployment benefits. But what’s less clear in some states is what happens with a claimant simply schedules and skips an interview, or never specifically turns down a job offer, but ghosts the offering employer.
Arkansas was the first state to legislatively prohibit UI claimant “ghosting” of employers. Tennessee clarified its work search law to enhance employer reporting of “ghosting,” while Utah, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota used executive or agency action.
Robust and defined work search requirements matter for workers and for re-employment, but they also matter for state UI trust funds. In a 24-month period following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, states paid nearly $1 billion in unemployment insurance benefits to individuals who failed to properly seek re-employment.
Policymakers in states with fewer than four or five required work searches each week should certainly increase the number of required work searches, and define acceptable actions so UI claimants know what is expected of them. With millions of open jobs, opportunity and upward mobility abound for workers. It’s time for state UI programs to recognize that and promote rapid re-employment.
