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90_HB1088ham001
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1 AMENDMENT TO HOUSE BILL 1088
2 AMENDMENT NO. . Amend House Bill 1088 by replacing
3 everything after the enacting clause with the following:
4 "Section 1. Short title. This Act may be cited as the
5 Re-employment Support Act.
6 Section 5. Findings and purpose.
7 (a) Families, children and the State of Illinois all
8 benefit when families are able to support themselves through
9 work. Work keeps the poorest families from needing welfare.
10 The encouragement and promotion of work is a high priority of
11 the State.
12 (b) Many poor workers who support families lose their
13 jobs from time to time for reasons other than misconduct
14 connected with work. It is important to help these families
15 become re-employed quickly and reduce the time that they
16 spend between jobs.
17 (c) The Unemployment Insurance program is designed to
18 help workers quickly locate new jobs, replace workers' wages
19 during the period between jobs so that their families can
20 stay out of poverty, conserve workers' basic assets (such as
21 home, car, and modest savings), and keep workers connected to
22 the labor force and off welfare. The Unemployment Insurance
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1 program has been effective in accomplishing these results for
2 the workers who qualify for it. When a worker receives
3 Unemployment Insurance after losing a job, the worker's
4 family is far less likely to fall into poverty than if the
5 worker did not receive Unemployment Insurance.
6 (d) Because of rules that limit workers' eligibility
7 Unemployment Insurance, many workers who lose their jobs for
8 reasons other than misconduct connected to the work do not
9 qualify for Unemployment Insurance when they lose a job. A
10 large majority of poor workers, particularly single mothers,
11 do not qualify for Unemployment Insurance. Many of these
12 working poor mothers have had to seek help from the Aid to
13 Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program to sustain
14 their families when they are between jobs. It is
15 significantly harder for a person receiving AFDC to become
16 re-employed than it is for a person receiving Unemployment
17 Insurance. For many workers, the desire to "stay off
18 welfare" is a motivating factor in their efforts to become
19 re-employed.
20 (e) AFDC is being replaced in Illinois by the Temporary
21 Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Under federal
22 TANF rules, persons may receive TANF benefits for a maximum
23 of 60 months in a lifetime. A working poor parent who is
24 forced to sustain her family with TANF benefits during
25 periods between jobs could exhaust her lifetime TANF benefits
26 while she still has young children. The worker would then
27 have no means to sustain the family between jobs. The family
28 would be forced to quickly deplete its assets (such as home,
29 car, and modest savings) and would incur serious risk of
30 falling into the deepest poverty, making it even harder for
31 the worker to become re-employed.
32 (f) For these reasons, the preferred re-employment
33 strategy in Illinois is Unemployment Insurance. The
34 Unemployment Insurance program, however, is funded by a
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1 special tax on employers, and it is not likely to be expanded
2 enough to cover as many workers as need it, especially poor
3 workers supporting families. It is not the purpose of this
4 Act to undermine, replace, state an opinion about, or
5 otherwise affect the Unemployment Insurance program itself or
6 the processes in place for funding, amending, and operating
7 it.
8 (g) The purpose of this Act is to expand the coverage of
9 the re-employment strategy exemplified by the Unemployment
10 Insurance program through creation of the Re-employment
11 Support program, to be funded with general revenues. The
12 Re-employment Support program is to be operated by the
13 Department of Employment Security side-by-side with the
14 Unemployment Insurance program. The Re-employment Support
15 program is to serve workers who do not qualify for
16 Unemployment Insurance, for reasons other than misconduct
17 connected with work, and who would otherwise likely resort to
18 the TANF program to sustain their families while they search
19 for re-employment. The intent is to facilitate early
20 re-employment for workers and reduce TANF usage in the
21 State.".