This dashboard highlights key performance indicators for UI systems nationwide, including how they perform during the current economic crisis, the impact of the CARES Act benefits expiring, the timeline for which benefits are delivered, demographics of benefits recipients, and total benefits payments.
This report outlines how modernizing unemployment insurance (UI) technology with a worker-centered approach can improve access, efficiency, and equity in the UI system.
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic and its induced recession underscored the crucial importance of unemployment insurance (UI) to workers, and to the stability of the American economy. Temporary federal expansions of unemployment systems during the pandemic showed how they can quickly be scaled to increase benefit levels and to include categories of workers who were not previously eligible, such as the self-employed, caregivers, and low-wage workers. And, states showed that separate programs can be set up to provide similar benefits to workers who are explicitly excluded from unemployment insurance—in particular immigrants who do not have a documented immigration status.
This guide is intended to provide everything else, with a focus on the basics of UI technology projects, guidance on standards for equitable uses of technology, and strategies for how to have a positive impact on these projects.
The report beings by briefly describing the challenge that disabled workers face in accessing UI and the benefits of reforming the system to better serve these workers. The report then presents a list of considerations for UI reform in the areas of administrative process and technology improvements as well as considerations for policy change.
This report explores the Maine Department of Labor’s (MDOL) remarkable response to this layoff through collaboration with the Peer Workforce Navigator project—a coalition of community-based organizations in partnership with the MDOL—which made a huge difference in the lives of these laid off workers. The report also examines aspects of the state’s unemployment insurance (UI) system that might be improved to account for similar situations in the future.
