Unemployment Insurance

Unemployment Insurance Fund

Position: Unlike in the Great Recession or in normal times, the massive unemployment in 2020 and 2021 was not the result of the business cycle or business decisions made by individual employers. A global pandemic caused customer insecurity and state and local shutdown orders, which directly led to job terminations. Similarly, employers had no ability to prevent the EDD’s mismanagement of fraud detection during the pandemic.

California’s policymakers must acknowledge this partial responsibility in creating the unprecedented insolvency of California’s UI Fund and should, following the lead of other states, help restore the solvency of the fund.

Although the 2022–2023 Budget began this process, it was mostly future commitments and was altogether too little to materially affect the fund’s condition. The CalChamber supports future proposals to reduce the UI Fund’s insolvency and mitigate future employer tax increases.

Unemployment Insurance Fund

Worked with author to make bill requiring electronic filing of unemployment insurance tax returns less onerous than originally proposed (AB 1245 of 2015).

Stopped an unemployment insurance tax increase that would have created a disincentive to hire new employees by tripling the already-high unemployment insurance taxes on California employers without a proper analysis of what is needed to reform California’s broken unemployment insurance system (SB 222 of 2009).