industry is facing what’s shaping up to be its worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression, as the pandemic hobbles businesses across the globe.
“This is completely unprecedented,” says Michele Evermore, senior policy analyst with the New York-based National Employment Law Project. “We’ve had to shift policies that weren’t meant to deal with this to deal with this crisis. Unemployment was not designed to replace all income but to create an incentive for people to go look for work.
The higher the number of employees of a given firm that apply for unemployment, the higher the unemployment tax rate assessed by the state for that firm. The rate structure is designed to encourage companies to provide stable employment. Furloughed workers are counted differently in the tax rate calculation process because the expectation is that they will return to the same job.