Our View: Missing the mark

When the family financial tragedies of the Great Depression gave rise to an unemployment insurance system, the idea wasn’t merely to rescue laid-off workers from starvation, it was also to lend stability to the economy as a whole.

If the jobless couldn’t feed, clothe and house their families, community businesses would be in a pinch, too. So, the reasoning went, money should be set aside during good times and put into consumers’ pockets during bad. That would keep the nation’s economic crises from widening into catastrophes.

To set the money aside during those good times, employers were taxed. But when economic fluctuations, wars or national disasters came along and put people out of work through no fault of their own, they would have a resource to tide them over until they could get back on their feet. Meanwhile, other businesses wouldn’t feel as heavy an impact, and additional job loss would be softened.

Over the years, however, the program has expanded its coverage beyond those initial purposes. Ask Dan Berger just how much expansion there’s been.

Last fall Berger hired a man who’d had some brushes with the law to work at a grocery store in Kettle Falls. Berger not only took a chance on Mitchell Ross, he even worked out a schedule so Ross could attend mandatory counseling sessions. That sounds like a humane thing for a boss to do.

But when Ross was jailed in King County on an outstanding warrant and couldn’t make it to work, Berger had to hire someone else. The state Employment Security Department ruled that since Ross’ dismissal didn’t result from on-the-job misconduct, he was eligible to collect unemployment insurance, meaning Berger’s unemployment insurance premium would go up.

Such incidents have happened before. Washington state takes a generous view of unemployment compensation claims.

A Mercer Island experience much like Dan Berger’s inspired a legislative response in 2006. A bill introduced that year would have made incarceration one of the examples of misconduct that would disqualify a fired employee from collecting jobless pay. The bill went nowhere.

Responding to the Kettle Falls case, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Employment Security said federal law limits what states can do. Yet among the criticisms leveled at the legislation proposed in 2006 was that it would prevent the department from considering individual circumstances.

For all the reasons that it was created in the first place, unemployment compensation is a valid tool that should be available to people whose livelihood is eroded by circumstances they can’t control. But employers – especially conscientious business owners who will take a chance on the marginally employable – shouldn’t be penalized for the poor personal choices, on the job or off, that put a worker in jail and unable to do his or her job.