Washington state is prominently featured in a Saturday New York Times article on “work sharing,” which is an unemployment insurance program that pays partial unemployment benefits to workers who have had their hours reduced.

Work sharing programs are extraordinarily popular among economists, Republican and Democratic policymakers, employers and workers — at least those who have heard of them. The problem is that few have, even though economists say work sharing is one of the best ways to strengthen the labor market during a downturn.

Of the nearly 30 million people receiving unemployment benefits, only 309,000 — 1 percent — are getting them through a shared work program.

Congress sweetened the program’s appeal during the pandemic, promising as part of the CARES Act that the federal government would pick up the cost from the states through the end of the year, without an overall cap, but nearly half of all states still don’t have such a program.

Washington is one state that does have a robust work sharing program, which is called SharedWork (link here). ESD commissioner Suzi LeVine is a big fan.

“I’m sick of this being the ‘best kept secret,’” Suzan LeVine, commissioner of Washington’s Employment Security Department, said of the program, officially titled short-time compensation. “It is the diamond in the rough of the unemployment benefits system.” …

Washington State, which started its program in 1983, has vastly expanded participation since the pandemic. Between March and August last year, 688 businesses took part; now 3,560 are doing so. One in nine Washington workers receiving state jobless benefits is getting them through work sharing.

Because of the current federal funding, shared work reduces outflow from the state unemployment insurance trust fund.

For states, which have been clobbered by zooming costs and plunging tax revenues, work sharing is like finding a winning lottery ticket tucked away in a drawer. Many states have exhausted their unemployment insurance trust funds — which are financed by taxing employers — and been forced to borrow from the federal government to continue paying benefits…

With work sharing, the federal government pays the bill…

[The program} can also mean significantly lower costs in the future for employers, whose unemployment insurance tax rates increase when layoffs rise.

The full article is available here.