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Typically, unemployed workers who have met their state’s eligibility criteria for benefits can receive up to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, which are intended to provide a financial cushion while the workers adapt to the loss of a job and household income. These state-funded benefits, often referred to as regular Unemployment Insurance (UI), are available regardless of the strength of the economy. However, when the nation as a whole is in a recession or recovering from one, Congress often enacts legislation that makes Federally funded unemployment benefits available to long-term unemployed workers through a temporary emergency program. The Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act of 2008 and related legislation provided such benefits in response to the recession that began in December 2007.

Depending on the level of the total unemployment rate in a given state, the EUC08 program included up to four separate and successive tiers (referred to as Tiers 1 through 4) of emergency unemployment benefits for people who exhausted their regular UI benefits. At the peak of the EUC08 program, such exhaustees in states with very high unemployment rates could receive up to 53 weeks of EUC08 benefits through all four tiers of EUC08 benefits. The EUC08 program began in June 2008 and ended in December 2013; during this period, more than $230 billion in EUC08 benefits was paid to long-term unemployed workers. The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 represented an important policy shift for the nation’s workforce system, because for the first time it required that states provide Reemployment Services and Reemployment and Eligibility Assessments (RES/REAs) to particular EUC08 benefit claimants. The EUC08 RES/REA program established by the Act sought to promote (1) improved access to reemployment assistance services among EUC08 claimants, and (2) increased scrutiny of eligibility for benefits.

The Act required that claimants who began collecting Tier 1 or who transitioned from Tier 1 to Tier 2 benefits on or after March 23, 2012, participate in the program, which included receiving (1) an orientation to an American Job Center (AJC) and the reemployment services and other resources made available through the center, (2) labor market and career information, (3) individual skills assessments, and (4) a review of their eligibility for EUC08 benefits based on their work search activities. Claimants who participated in the program when starting Tier 1 EUC08 benefits were not required to participate again when transitioning from Tier 1 to Tier 2 benefits. States also had discretion to waive the program participation requirement for claimants who had recently completed similar services or activities through other programs, or who had other allowable causes for nonparticipation (such as seeking work only through a union hiring hall). The program’s scale was substantial—according to data reported by states to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), between April 2012 and December 2013, more than 5 million claimants were scheduled for EUC08 RES/REA services, and more than 3 million received services nationwide.

The report presents findings from a study of the implementation of the EUC08 RES/REA program in nine purposively selected states. This study sought to identify strategies that the selected states used to successfully implement the program at scale and practices that federal, state, and local administrators could consider in the future for similar programs. The study examined how the nine study states designed their programs; the strategies they used to foster participation in services and overcome challenges with program administration; and lessons learned. For the analysis, researchers relied primarily on qualitative information collected through discussions with state-level administrators and a subset of frontline staff at one AJC in each study state. At the state level, researchers typically conducted interviews with the UI program director, the EUC08 RES/REA program coordinator, and the state-level Wagner-Peyser (WP) program director. At the local office level, they typically interviewed UI and/or WP frontline staff who interacted directly with EUC08 RES/REA program claimants.

Research Questions

• What strategies did states use to implement the mandated EUC08 RES/REAs service requirements?
• How were UI and other state staff resources allocated to the program?
• Which components were delivered in person, and which were delivered online or remotely (for example, via phone or video conference)?
• What were the perceived characteristics and needs of EUC08 RES/REA program claimants?
• What practices for serving the EUC08 claimants were viewed as successful?

Key Takeaways

• Study states relied mostly on in-person introduction to and provision of EUC08 RES/REA services.
• Study states were split in how they bundled the required activities, allowing claimants to complete the mandated services either in a single AJC visit or over two AJC visits.
• Frontline staff perceived that EUC08 claimants benefited from interactions with other long-term unemployed claimants through a group service format.
• Frontline staff introduced claimants to, but were generally unable to provide much detailed assistance with, skills assessment and Labor Market Information (LMI) services.
• Most states used the same thresholds for assessing work search effort, such as the minimum weekly number of contacts with employers, for the EUC08 and regular UI programs.
• State and frontline staff reported that they engaged EUC08 claimants in a number of additional services beyond the four mandatory RES/REA program activities. Some of these additional activities that were required included completing resume reviews (4 states), developing customers’ individualized service or career plans (2 states), or career guidance (1 state). Additional services, when required, were viewed by staff as critical to the success of the claimants’ efforts to become reemployed.

Research Gaps

• All the study research questions and analyses are descriptive. That is, we did not develop any causal models with which to estimate the effectiveness of the EUC08 RES/REA program on claimants’ employment outcomes, because such modeling was beyond the scope of the current project. Hence, no causal conclusions about the effectiveness of the EUC08 RES/REA program should be drawn from the findings of this study. A mandate for most or all claimants to participate in reemployment services earlier in their unemployment periods might be more effective than one that waits until claimants are long-term unemployed. We recommend that additional effort be made to ensure that data collected and reported for program monitoring purposes are of high quality. Other factors besides the presence of a similar program (such as the UI REA program) might be especially important for influencing the ease and ultimate success of implementation of a new program that combines reemployment services and eligibility assessments. In a few study states, successful implementation of the EUC08 RES/REA program might have come about in part at the expense of other programs. (pages x; xix)

Citation

Needels, K., Perez-Johnson, I., Dunn, A., Sattar, S., Hague Angus, M., Smither Wulsin, C. (2015). Mathematica. Implementation of the EUC08 Reemployment Services and Reemployment Eligibility Assessments Program: Findings from Nine States. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.