Peter Ruark

On Thursday we heard Gov. Rick Snyder outline his workforce development agenda for the state of Michigan. He said several things that sparked our interest here at the League, mostly positive.

Without outlining any policy positions, the governor stressed the need to address factors that contribute to what he termed “structural unemployment,” which is generally understood as unemployment resulting from the mismatch of the demands of the labor market and the ability of workers to meet those demands. Normally this is attributed to lack of needed skills on the part of workers, but the governor  –  in addition to this — also cited child care and transportation barriers. We have for many years urged the state to make a serious effort to address these barriers as well as skills deficits among low-wage workers.

Gov. Snyder also mentioned “tying workforce development funds to meaningful workforce measures” through a data-sharing system. As we have written before, data is power; we cannot adequately measure how well programs are working without collecting and aggregating meaningful data with which to measure success. We hope the governor intends the system to collect data on the persistence and success of students who go through basic skills programs (such as adult education and community colleges remedial/developmental education) in addition to data on occupational training programs that lead directly to employment. (See the paper The Key Ingredient: Data is Crucial to Building Michigan’s Workforce System.)

One solid policy change proposal in the speech was to end the current Michigan Works! Agency policy that jobseekers seek services from only the one-stop centers in their designated Michigan Works! region. This sometimes creates difficulty for individuals who live closer to a center outside their region. The  governor urged a new policy requiring every Michigan Works! Agency door to be open to every eligible person who seeks assistance.

We applaud the governor for supporting work sharing in his address. In a recent Unemployment Insurance paper we published, Falling Short: Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Compares Poorly with Other Midwestern States, we recommended that Michigan implement a work-sharing program that would enable qualifying employers in difficult circumstances to avert layoffs by spreading the pain more broadly but not as deeply — reducing the hours of many employees and making up the wage difference with UI benefits instead of laying off a few employees entirely. There is a bill currently in the House that would create a work-sharing program (House Bill 4516), and the governor included this in his plan.

We do wish Gov. Snyder had called for restoring the six weeks of UI benefits that the Legislature cut earlier this year, however. Unemployment may have gone down slightly in recent months, but Michigan still has a long way to go and his support for raising the maximum weeks of state-funded benefits back up to 26 would go a long way toward enabling it to happen.

– Peter Ruark

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Categories: Blog: Factually Speaking, Workforce Development | Tags: safety net, unemployment, unemployment insurance, vulnerable families