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During the House State Government Committee’s meeting on Wednesday, the committee voted to advance HB29, a bill introduced by Rep. Ed Oliver, R-Dadeville, that would make it harder for Alabama workers to continue receiving unemployment insurance payments.
Specifically, the legislation would raise the number of potential employers an unemployed individual must contact every week to remain eligible for unemployment insurance from three to five and make failures to notify employers about not showing up for an interview or skills test disqualify workers from receiving benefits for five weeks.
Speaking for Oliver, who is recovering from surgery, Rep. Debbie Wood, R-Valley, told the committee that the legislation is “really a workforce development bill.”
“Currently there’s 127,000 open positions in the state of Alabama,” she said. “But we have people that are drawing unemployment, with 127,000 open positions.” Wood also cited an estimate that the state spent $1.5 million on unemployment insurance “that we should not have spent” in 2023.
She then stressed that the bill won’t require people to accept job offers that couldn’t support them, or that are too far away, and said it would help address ghosting: “when you go and apply for a job, they make you an offer, and you never call them back.”
The only member of the public who spoke on the bill before the committee on Wednesday, Alabama Arise worker policy advocate Dev Wakeley, told them that HB29 was “an attempt to implement a work search standard that was explicitly rejected by the legislature just three years ago.”
The requirement to reach out to employers every week was added by SB224 in 2022, a bill introduced by Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur. The initial text of the bill called for a five employer requirement just like HB29 would create. But a month after the bill was introduced, the Senate approved an amendment Orr introduced that reduced the requirement to three employers and directed the state Department of Labor to “provide applicants … with simple instructions.”
Rep. Kelvin Lawrence, D-Hayneville, concurred with Wakeley and questioned whether residents of rural counties could reasonably apply to five employers every week.
“In the town of Hayneville, it’s five legitimate businesses,” Lawrence said. “It’s Family Dollar, it’s Dollar Tree, it’s QV gas station, and it’s Subway.”
“I own the Subway,” he stated. “And I guarantee you I get probably 20 people a day coming in asking for a job.” Lawrence also said he believes “those individuals that really want to work, they’re desperately out there trying to find work,” and the people the bill is targeting are “not going to work whether you make them do it three times, five times, or ten times.”
Rep. Marilyn Lands, D-Huntsville, told the committee she feels HB29 “really penalizes the least of the least.” Referencing her personal faith, Lands said the bill is “not in the spirit of Jesus” and called it a “cruel” piece of legislation.
In an interview on Wednesday, Wakeley told APR he doesn’t think the “ghosting” Wood pointed to is “really prevalent,” calling it “another instance of this bill trying to find problems where they’re not really existing.”
“This is an antiworker bill, and it’s a pro-employer bill that relies on a mistaken view of the way that people really behave,” he continued. Responding to the points made by Wood about past overspending, Wakeley said overpayments aren’t addressed by denying people eligibility and the bill is creating “unnecessary barriers to a process that lets people see to very basic needs.”
“Nobody’s getting rich off $275 a week,” he quipped, referencing the maximum unemployment benefit rate in Alabama.
In the third quarter of 2024, the average weekly benefit was $252.86 and fewer than two-fifths of benefit recipients in the previous 12 months actually “exhausted” the benefits they were eligible for.
The most recent release of the Help Wanted Online data series from the Alabama Department of Labor also shows that the number of unemployed workers in Alabama surpassed the number of active online job ads in December. And according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national hire rate remains below recent years at 3.4 percent.
Near the close of the committee meeting, Wood said the legislature is “responsible for people’s money” and that is a “big burden.”
“Our burden is to ensure that we’re spending our money and being fiscally responsible with our money and we’re spending 1.5 million dollars that we shouldn’t spend on claims,” Wood explained. “And we also need to be helping these individuals that desperately need employees.”
Despite the concerns of the Democratic representatives on the committee, a majority voted in favor of reporting HB29 favorably to the state House.
