WASHINGTON, D.C. — Senator Rob Portman wants to pay you to go back to work if you’ve been on unemployment because of the coronavirus pandemic.
What You Need To Know
- Republican Sen. Rob Portman proposes $450 weekly bonus if people go back to work
- Labor Secretary says “it’s something to consider”
- Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan open to idea down the road
“A lot of small businesses in particular have come to me and said, ‘I’m ready to start reopening, but I’m having real trouble getting workers because they can make substantially more on unemployment insurance, at certain levels, than they can in coming back to work,’” Portman said in an interview on May 14. “We don’t want that. We want people to be back to work for all the right reasons.”
Lawmakers agreed to a $600 increase in federal unemployment insurance back in March, so if you’ve been out of work because of COVID-19, you’ve been receiving that money each week plus some money provided by the state you live in. (About $360 per week in Ohio)
Currently, that $600 increase is set to stop at the end of July.
Most Democrats want to extend it through the New Year, but most Republicans don’t because they argue middle or lower-income workers are profiting off unemployment.
“So if you make $52,000 a year in Ohio, roughly, it’s more advantageous for you, from a dollar point of view, to stay on unemployment insurance rather than go back to work,” Portman said. “Our program makes it more advantageous for you to go back to work.”
Under Portman’s proposed bonus, if you go back to work now, you’d receive your paycheck plus $450 per week from the federal government for six weeks or until the end of July.
Portman said if 25-percent of people currently on unemployment took this route, it could save state governments and Washington up to $50 billion.
Representative Tim Ryan (D, 13th Congressional District), who has been a leading voice in sending people more direct payments during the pandemic, told me in an interview on May 15 — before last week’s jobs report that showed unemployment slightly dropping — that he’d be happy to talk about the proposal down the road, but argued at the time that it was too soon.
“I do believe that at some point when the unemployment rate is going down, that we do need to make sure we’re not incentivizing people to stay home,” Ryan said. “That’s bad economics, it’s bad social policy, it’s just bad all the way around.”
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) was recently asked about the proposal and said there wasn’t money at the state level to make it happen. He also said he didn’t want to twist people’s arms to go back to work until they felt safe.
Here in Washington, I recently had the chance to ask the U.S. Secretary of Labor about it.
“Do you think that’s something at the federal level that should be looked at?” I asked Sec. Eugene Scalia on May 29.
“It’s — Senator Portman’s proposal is one that has been discussed,” he said. “The concept is simply, again, we want to bring people back into the workplace after this period where they’ve been forced out…So it’s something to consider, but there are other options that are on the table that we’re taking a look at.”
Portman said he’s also concerned people will have a gap in their resume, will lose training, or may end up losing their job if they don’t go back once or if it has started up again.
