Improving Access to New York’s Unemployment Insurance System
(August 2003)
by National Employment Law Project

Only 44% of unemployed New Yorkers ever receive any unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, less than any other state in the region.  Even when a worker is eligible for UI, administrative barriers often block access to this critical temporary income support.  A number of improvements could ensure an accessible and healthy UI system.

• Provide access to non-English speakers.  The current system relies exclusively on English and Spanish even though over a quarter of New York City residents speak another language at home.  This approach discriminates against immigrant communities and could be remedied by connecting claimants with multilingual staff and automated systems, providing interpreters when multilingual service is unavailable and during administrative hearings, and translating documents into the major languages spoken in New York.  Other states such as California, Massachusetts, and Washington already provide broader language access than New York despite having fewer workers with limited English.

• Stop ignoring workers’ most recent earnings.  New York normally disregards a worker’s most recent 3-6 months of earnings when determining whether someone has worked enough to get UI, a practice that adversely affects low-wage, temporary, and seasonal workers, as well as those re-entering the labor market.  The law provides for an “alternate base period” to fix the problem, but the Department of Labor usually either ignores it altogether or fails to gather the information necessary to use it.
  

• Properly inform workers of their rights to UI.  Many workers never apply for UI because they don’t know how to or they mistakenly believe that they are ineligible.  Workers should be notified of their right to apply for UI whenever a job ends.  The current law in this area has enormous loopholes that should be closed.
  

• Help workers navigate the bureaucracy.  The UI system is extremely complex and inaccessible.  Getting help is often impossible because state employees at local offices are forbidden to assist workers with their claims and seeking assistance by phone means endless delays, busy signals, and cutoffs.  This red tape could be cut by allowing in-person claims in at least one office per county, appointing an ombudsman to investigate problems with service delivery, and expanding workers’ access to legal assistance.
  

• Make the system responsive to economic downturns.  The state’s UI program can do a better job responding to recessions, when unemployed workers need benefits quicker and for longer periods of time.  Workers should not be forced wait a week after being laid off before becoming eligible for benefits. New York should adopt legislation making it easier to bring in federal help automatically when the state unemployment rate is high, and the state should extend benefits itself when federal help is insufficient.  And with jobs being permanently lost, the state should beef up the existing program that allows workers to retrain for new jobs while on UI.
   

• Plan ahead to keep UI fiscally sound.  Tax cuts throughout the 1990s left New York needlessly unprepared for the current downturn and forced it to borrow from the federal government.  One reason is that UI taxes apply only to a small fraction of most workers’ salaries, with no adjustments for inflation.  As a result, New York taxes less of each paycheck than 28 other states even though it has the third highest wages in the nation.