Kasey Hughart worked as an intern at the Oklahoma Policy Institute while attending the University of Tulsa as a Sociology major/Spanish minor.  Kasey is active in advocating for immigrant rights as the co-affiliate lead for DREAM Act Oklahoma, an official affiliate within the United We DREAM National Network. Kasey hopes to pursue a career in social work after graduate school. 

Wage theft, or an employer’s failure to pay a worker for completed labor, has emerged as a serious danger in the 21st century labor market.  According to a 2011 report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), wage theft is widespread. It is not limited to a specific industry or employer, and it is frequently deliberate.  It can take many forms, including “being paid less than the minimum wage, working off the clock without pay, getting less than time and a half for overtime hours, having tips stolen, and seeing illegal deductions taken out of paychecks.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, Chris Linder was sworn into office as mayor of Pawnee, but he may not be allowed to serve. In 2000, Linder was convicted of a felony in Arizona for his role in a drug deal and gun battle. He served five years in prison and three years of probation.

After completing his sentence two years ago, Linder moved to Pawnee with his wife. He bought a local restaurant, volunteered with the Chamber of Commerce and as a baseball coach, and joined the First Baptist Church. He was elected mayor in April, beating out the incumbent and another former mayor. The felony became public during the campaign, but a plurality of voters believed he was the right person to lead the city anyway.

What they didn’t know was that Oklahoma law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony from holding a public office for 15 years after their sentence is completed. Linder applied for a pardon after learning about the law, but Arizona turned him down. Read the rest of this entry »

“There’s no excuse for states to let 100 percent federally funded jobless support just die on the vine,” said Christine Owens, Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project. ”This is a no-brainer for states to help their workers, businesses and economies.”

The no-brainer Owens refers to is an unemployment insurance extension known as Extended Benefits approved by Congress and waiting to be used by states.

Oklahoma is one of 9 qualifying states – along with Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Utah and Wyoming —that has not taken advantage of the Extended Benefits provision that NELP estimates would provide 13 additional weeks of assistance for over 29,000 long-term unemployed Oklahomans and inject $101 million in federally-funded benefits to help support Oklahoma families and businesses. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite encouraging signs that an economic recovery is gaining strength, unemployment remains at stubbornly and unacceptably high levels. Nationally, the jobless rate in October stayed stuck at 9.6 percent, while the latest state unemployment numbers found that 121,800 Oklahomans, or 6.9 percent of the workforce, are out of work. While some workers have relatively short stints of unemployment between jobs, the magnitude of the job losses this recession and the slow pace of recent job creation have left a large segment of the unemployed population unable to find work for extended periods. According to the National Employment Law Project, the unemployed are experiencing record periods of joblessness: nearly 42 percent of the 15 million jobless workers are “long-term unemployed”—that is, out of work for six months or longer. With there being 4.6 unemployed workers for every available job, most of the unemployed continue to be without work through no fault of their own.

For many of these jobless workers and their families, weekly Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits provide an essential safety net allowing them to recoup a portion of their lost income – about $290 per week on average – and  pay the bills without additional public support or a full-blown financial emergency. As in past national recessions, Congress has responded to high levels of unemployment by approving federally-funded extensions of UI benefits that go beyond the basic 26 weeks of state-funded benefits. Under the main temporary program of federal jobless benefits, called Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC),  qualified unemployed workers who are actively seeking work receive an additional 34 to 53 weeks of UI benefits, depending on the state’s unemployment rate. NELP reports that so far, in 2010 alone, nearly 9.5 million workers collected federally funded benefits, contributing an estimated $68 billion to the nation’s economy. Read the rest of this entry »

Our October edition of Numbers You Need is now out, providing a snapshot of economic and budget trends in Oklahoma through monthly data on jobs, inflation, public benefits, and state revenues, as well as the most recent quarterly data on building permits and an annual update on the poverty rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Across the nation, the deep, prolonged economic recession is putting great strains on state Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs. Oklahoma is hardly immune from these challenges, but our problems are less severe than elsewhere. The combination of having entered the recession with our UI program in good fiscal health, the relative mildness of the downturn in Oklahoma, and the Legislature’s willingness to do what needed to be done to get the boost of available federal stimulus dollars should help  allow the state’s UI program to continue to provide a temporary source of income until employment prospects improve.

As everyone knows, the June jobs report was brutal – the nation lost an additional 467,000 jobs, the unemployment rate reached 9.5 percent, and the total number of unemployed Americans hit 14.7 million, an all-time high. State-level figures for June have not yet been released, but May did bring relatively good news for Oklahoma, as the state’s 0.1 percent increase in the unemployment rate (from 6.2 percent to 6.3 percent) was far less severe than in prior months or in the nation as a whole. Still, the state saw its number of unemployed hit 111,700 for the month, an increase of nearly 50,000 compared to a year prior. The unemployment rate has now topped 7.5 percent in 19 counties, led by Hughes County, whose jobless rate reached 10.9 percent in May. The number of Oklahomans claiming Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits rose to just under 50,000 in May, a 208 percent increase compared to May 2008. Almost 10,000 long-term unemployed workers in the state who have already exhausted their initial period of UI eligibility have now become eligible for an additional 13 weeks of benefits.

Such developments are putting enormous stress on state unemployment insurance systems. Every state has an Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund which collects revenues and pays out benefits. When fewer workers are employed, states pay out more in benefits while taking in less in UI tax collections. Yet while Oklahoma’s Trust Fund balance has declined over the past year, we are in a much stronger situation than most states.

Read the rest of this entry »