In the Puget Sound Business Journal today, my column examines the 2011 legislative session’s big accomplishment so far: an agreement on unemployment insurance that drew overwhelming bipartisan support.

It’s a good deal, providing tax relief to 90 percent of the state’s employers and increasing benefits for 70,000 unemployed workers.

Conditions aligned for this to be an easy call, not an extraordinary accomplishment.

…Unusual among the states, Washington has a healthy unemployment insurance trust fund, with a balance approaching $2.5 billion.

And that money made compromise possible.

The unemployment insurance compromise is built on that increasingly rare foundation, a bedrock of cash …

Dividing the spoils — allocating from abundance — begins and ends with the understanding that there’s enough to give everyone something. Conflict is mitigated by knowledge that a reasonable accommodation can be reached that maintains relationships.

Scraps over scarcity offer no such buffer.

The unemployment deal was very important, as the WRC has noted before, in this reform proposal and this report on employment costs. The state workers’ compensation system is similarly in critical need of reform, as we pointed out in this paper urging policy makers to adopt mainstream policy changes.

Unfortunately, rather than enjoying a large trust fund, the workers’ comp system faces a looming deficit, as reported in Washington State Wire. That’s one reason this column by AWB president Don Brunell again urges lawmakers to make necessary changes.

The money may not be there to paper over the conflicts. But the insolvency of the workers’ comp system makes reform this year an urgent priority. In an unusual move, the deputy director of the department of labor and industries asked the state labor council to back additional policy changes, according to the Olympian.

Sticking to just the labor-approved elements of reform is “not enough,” LaPalm said. He said the system needs to provide insurance-rate relief for employers whose premiums are going up by double digits.