Florida becomes the 23rd GOP-led state to end $300-a-week pandemic unemployment benefits
The announcement brings the number of GOP-led states that are terminating the special pandemic supplement early to 23 — all citing labor shortages as the reason. A total of 4 million laid-off Americans will forgo roughly $23.3 billion in benefits, according to The Century Foundation.
Four other states, including Ohio and Arizona, are also keeping these programs until they expire in early September.
But 19 states are terminating them along with the extra $300 weekly payments, which will strip roughly 2.1 million out-of-work Americans of all their unemployment compensation.
“Transitioning away from this benefit will help meet the demands of small and large businesses who are ready to hire and expand their workforce,” Dane Eagle, secretary of the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity, said, of the $300 payment.
Ending benefits early
The enhanced payments — which Congress first approved in its massive coronavirus relief plan in March 2020 and twice extended — are keeping Americans from returning to the labor market, the governors say. At least four states will offer return-to-work bonuses instead.
Democratic lawmakers and consumer advocates have appealed to the US Department of Labor to prevent the GOP states from pulling out of the federal unemployment programs, arguing that many Americans are still having trouble finding suitable jobs or can’t work because of childcare or health-related issues caused by the pandemic.
Whether the beefed up benefits are keeping people from accepting job offers is a matter of debate. Economists at the University of Chicago and Yale University, among others, found that last year’s $600 federal supplement to unemployment benefits had little to no impact on laid-off workers’ decisions.
A study released last week by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that the $600 boost would have only deterred “a small share” of job seekers from accepting job offers.
“Moreover, a simple extrapolation of those empirical results to early 2021 suggests that the $300 weekly UI supplement currently in place has been making a small but likely noticeable contribution to job-finding rates and employers’ perceptions of worker availability,” the researchers wrote.
