BUSINESS
By Jamie Smith Hopkins, The Baltimore Sun | October 14, 2012
Many Maryland employers will see the tax they pay for unemployment insurance drop by more than half next year. The tax cut, which will be announced Monday by the state Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, reflects the improving employment situation in the state and should give businesses a boost as they use that money for other purposes. The unemployment insurance tax soared several years ago as the ranks of the unemployed spiked during the recession, which in turn depleted the state's trust fund for jobless benefits.
NEWS
By Robert Kuttner | September 16, 1991
UNEMPLOYMENT compensation is fast becoming a mere relic of what was once a comprehensive system of social insurance. Recently, the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, using Labor Department figures, reported that an all-time record number of jobless people -- 334,000 -- exhausted their unemployment benefits this July.In every previous postwar recession, Congress added temporary, emergency programs to extend benefits beyond the standard 26 RobertKuttnerweeks. This time, the Democratic Congress belatedly moved in early August to extend benefits up to an additional 20 weeks in states with high rates of unemployment.
NEWS
January 1, 2012
Imagine my surprise this morning when I saw letters from apparently well-fed individuals complaining about paying unemployment insurance. For all those beleaguered employers who don't want to pay unemployment benefits I've got a solution: Hire illegal immigrants. They are non-persons, so an employer does not have to pay unemployment insurance and really shouldn't bother about niceties like Workers' Compensation, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, unions, OSHA or any other oppressive, socialistic safety net provisions.
NEWS
By Eileen Ambrose, The Baltimore Sun | December 28, 2011
The owner of the Sparrows Point steel mill has told state unemployment insurance officials that about 720 workers at the Baltimore County plant are being furloughed and are expected back on the job March 4. Managers started telling workers last Thursday not to show up for work this week in what was described then as an "indefinite" layoff, plant employees told The Baltimore Sun. The plant's owner, RG Steel, did not give Maryland officials notice...
NEWS
December 21, 2009
M aryland business groups have been up in arms in recent months about automatic increases in unemployment insurance payments that are about to kick in - costing them $136-$383 extra per worker. It's a tough thing to take in the middle of a recession, but it is necessary to keep the fund solvent in the face of so many layoffs. Now Gov. Martin O'Malley has unveiled a plan that would shave $83 million off the tax increase companies will have to pay, allow them to pay over a longer period of time and reduce the interest rate for late payments from 1.5 percent to 1 percent.
NEWS
By Peter T. Kilborn and Peter T. Kilborn,NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE | March 25, 2002
SOUTH BOSTON, Va. - For 13 years, Amy Altman worked at the JPS Apparel Fabrics plant here, and wound up earning $9.50 an hour. With production grinding toward a halt early last year, she began working one week on and one off, and on the off weeks she collected a $224 unemployment check. When the plant closed on Aug. 1, letting 346 workers go, the checks continued. But in October, they stopped. Her eligibility, limited to six months, had expired. Creditors phoned. "When would I pay?" she recalls them asking.