Episode 27: How can the General Assembly fix unemployment (and other economic issues)?

Following the dangerous events in D.C. last week and a second impeachment vote today, it’s easy to forget that state lawmakers just convened for this year’s short General Assembly session. A host of important economic issues are slated for discussion as Virginia workers continue to feel the hurt from the COVID-19 crisis.

This week, we talk with Sally Hudson, who represents Virginia's 57th district in the Virginia House of Delegates.

 Episode Transcript

Nathan Moore: This is Bold Dominion, an explainer for state politics in a changing Virginia. I’m Nathan Moore.

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Happy birthday to us! This week, Bold Dominion celebrates our one-year anniversary. Feel free to give us gifts made of paper, if you're the traditional type.

Episode one of this podcast dropped just before last year's General Assembly session -- the first legislative session in decades with Democratic majorities in both the House of Delegates and the State Senate. We asked: how does the General Assembly actually work? Freshly elected lawmaker Sally Hudson helped explain it to us.

So it's right and proper that we turn to Sally again this week, on the eve of the 2021 General Assembly session. Which is a short session this year -- only six weeks long.

Sally Hudson: Right now the compressed schedule doesn't just shrink the docket and restrict the number of things that we can tackle--it also robs us of a lot of good deliberative time. The most controversial issues pile up into the last couple days, and then get weaponized against each other, which doesn't create sound public policy.

NM: Sally Hudson represents the Charlottesville area in the General Assembly, and she's an advocate for Virginia to adopt a year-round professional legislature. We talk more about that and other issues in the second half of today's show.

With this year's short and virtual session, state delegates are limited to only seven bills that they can introduce. In the first half of today's show, we talk about Sally's top priority -- fixing the state's unemployment insurance system and helping Virginia workers recover from the Covid crisis.  Representative Sally Hudson spoke with Bold Dominion Producer Charlie Bruce, kicking things off with a conversation about why state politics matters so much in the first place.

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SH: I think the number one thing that I wish more people knew about their state legislature is that most of the decisions that you feel in your daily lives are decided in Richmond. A lot of what Congress does is dole out money and put broad guardrails on how states run programs. But states have enormous discretion to decide how to implement. And we see that in unemployment. And we see that in voting rights. States make most of the decisions that you run into every day at the grocery store, or at your Social Services Office. And so I wish more people prioritized state government when it comes to their media diet, because it's easy to get distracted by DC, especially in chaotic and deeply divided times. But I think if more people embrace state government, and recognized just how much it matters for their schools and their jobs and all of their day-to-day living, I think we get a lot better governance. And I think in particular, that's something that progressives need to hear, because progressives are used to thinking that there are big solutions to big problems. And that's true. But it's also the case that state government is often the proving ground for whether those big ideas get delivered effectively. And it's also the pilot ground where we try new things that percolate up to DC and become the basis for the next big idea.

Charlie Bruce: Generally, legislators can introduce fifteen bills in a normal in-person session. Given the extenuating circumstances, you're limited to seven bills this session. What was your thought process in selecting those seven bills to introduce?

SH: So my top priority for this session is unemployment insurance reform, because it's the number one thing that I heard from constituents this year. That makes the decision-making process--that makes the decision-making process pretty easy. Everything else follows from there. It's trying to confront the most acute parts of the economic crisis and recovery from COVID. Unemployment insurance systems across the country, were totally overwhelmed by the COVID crisis, fielding ten times as many applications as they ever had before. And I think what we saw--and what people like me who do labor economics, and that I've known for a long time, is that we've been piling up inefficiencies and injustices in our public benefits system for many years. And COVID just threw them all into stark relief.

So I think that there are three immediate priorities. One is about making sure that the state can't cut off benefits until it's settled on a good reason. We heard horror stories from lots of constituents like a construction worker in my district, who was laid off in March applied for UI, got payments for three weeks, and then they suddenly stopped without warning. And he waited four months to figure out why, because he was in this big administrative backlog of queue where they were resolving potential concerns. It turns out that by the time he got to the front of the line, he was told that the reason his case was flagged for review is that there was a mismatch between what he told the state about his earnings history and what the state already knew. And there was a good reason. He was a construction worker. And so he works handyman odd jobs sometimes. And so he had contractor income that he reports in on his federal tax returns, but doesn't naturally feed into the state payroll system. So just because of that little discrepancy, which was honest and real, and he was right to report, he went without thousands of dollars for four months, because the state wasn't clearing its administrative queue fast enough. So the bill that I'm carrying would say that the state can't cut off payments, until it's actually concluded what's wrong--it can't just flag you and say: "Oh, we've observed something unusual here. And we need to learn more." They don't get to cut off the payments until they learn that there's actually something wrong. That's the first provision.

The second provision is about trying to make that review process more efficient, by incentivizing employers to participate. Right now, our state law really doesn't give employers much of a carrot to help resolve claim disputes either. And that's because employers can not respond to state requests for information repeatedly. And then if they don't, they eventually face a very small, fine, about $75, which for some employers is just a small price to pay for not answering the mail and resolving the records. And, you know, I understand I have definitely been somebody who has let let her slip in my life. I think, especially in the very digital world, sometimes we we forget that our snail mail is a thing. But if you're the worker waiting on the other side for your unemployment checks, then that waiting feels like an eternity. And so we have lots of workers tell us that their claim stopped and then got stuck in the review queue for months. And it just wasn't urgent for the employer to resolve the claim. It was urgent for the worker. And so I think we need to level playing field a little bit and give the employers a stronger incentive to respond and help those reviews get done. And so the bill that I'm carrying would make it so that if employers aren't responding after the second time, then they can lose their rights to appeal the claim. And so I think that that makes it so that the employers start to see resolving claims with the same urgency that their workers are feeling while their bills are piling up.

And then the last provision is really about making sure that when the state does make mistakes in resolving claims, that they can't take that money back from the workers once it's already out the door. Especially this year, when we had a big federal supplement on top of the UI. People were getting thousands of dollars in unemployment benefits as they should. But they were finding out months later that the VC had made an error in processing their claim. And they got a letter out of nowhere that says: "You owe us $15,000." We had a home health aide in Charlottesville, who was laid off in March, and then got a letter in July that says you owe the state 15 grand and she's thinking: "I don't have that money, I already spent it on rent and gas and groceries and other needs." And so we are carrying legislation that would end the practice of the state collecting overpayments back from workers unless the worker committed fraud. If the worker misrepresented who they are, if they misrepresented their work history, if they were actively trying to defraud the state, that's one thing. But we need to put the onus for properly processing payments on the state where it belongs because it just goes against any kind of equity in good conscience to put somebody in debt, just because they reached out for help.

Beyond that, it's really about continuing to push on a lot of the strong progressive reform priorities that I was elected on. Things like combating climate change--so I'm carrying a bill to retire our coal tax credits so that we will stop subsidizing fossil fuels here in Virginia, and can invest in the future of regions like southwest Virginia instead of their past. And then in addition, I'm carrying a couple pieces of legislation on reforming our criminal legal system, and unwinding the system of fines and fees that act as poverty traps for convicted people, and then also reducing the penalties for drug possession so that we can start confronting drug use like a public health and economic crisis, rather than a criminal issue.

And then, in addition, one more, which is I think, part of a broader project for me, but also urgent in the moment is ending the ban on abortion care coverage on our state marketplace for health insurance. That is important work about peeling back the many barriers to reproductive health care in Virginia that got piled up by Republicans over the years, but it's especially important now because a lot of people have recently lost their jobs. And so they've been forced onto the state marketplace for health insurance and discovered that things that they thought would be covered or not. And so I think that it, like everything collides with COVID in unexpected ways, but is part of helping Virginia catch up to other states that are supporting comprehensive reproductive health care.

CB: I was particularly interested by the bill you're introducing on eliminating fines and fees for people who are in court and are having interest accumulate on those fines and fees.

SH: It's a lot of little nip/tuck things here and there. So I mean, broadly speaking, we have court fines and fees. So fines are like penalties and punishments, and fees are the costs you incur for the operation of the courts. I think a lot of people don't realize is that if you are ensnared in our criminal legal system, then we charge that person for every step of the experience going through it, whether they are paying a down payment, on their, their fines, you know, there's there's fees for that. There's fees for swiping your credit card to pay off the fine. So at every step of the way, we just ding people more and more and it's very quick that folks wind up with big debts that they can't conceivably pay off.

NM: Sally Hudson represents the Charlottesville area in the Virginia House of Delegates. We’ll hear more from her after a short break.

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And we’re back with the second half of producer Charlie Bruce's interview with state lawmaker Sally Hudson.

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CB: One of the things that is popular in the session is on MLK Day for Lobby Day where citizens will come into the legislature and they'll advocate for certain bills to be passed. What is the future of advocacy from citizens going to look like in this virtual session?

SH: I think that remote legislating in some ways makes the legislature more accessible to a wider range of people. Because there are lots of people who would never get in a car and drive down to Richmond to be there in person. And so we have people now tuning in to testify from all across Virginia, who don't have a full day to spend to come to a committee, especially if you think about people who live further away from our state capitol than we do--from southwest and Hampton Roads and up in NoVA. In Charlottesville, we're sort of fortunate that the Capitol is only a little more than an hour away. So I think people here are more physically engaged. But the downside is that there absolutely is something that's lost by not being able to get physically in a room with people and have those tighter in-person conversations. So I think it's a mixed bag. You know, I look forward to the day that we go back to in-person legislating because something is definitely lost in the process. But I think that we will also keep a lot of cool lessons learned about how we make the process more accessible to people using all of the digital tools that we've become more comfortable with.

CB: And for those who are trying to advocate for specific bills to be passed in the legislature this year--how do you recommend that they politely get in contact with their representative or a representative whose mind they want to change?

SH: So the most important thing to remember is that the representative who wants to listen to you is the one you can vote for. And so you should always be trying to target your advocacy toward the delegate or senators who represent you. It is candidly very difficult to have your voice heard by a member who doesn't represent your district, unless you already have a pre-existing relationship with that person. And that's not nefarious. It's just a bandwidth constraint. We get hundreds of thousands of emails into our state inboxes and our social media accounts and our phone calls every single week. And with only one staffer, we can't possibly listen to all of them with the same depth and so we rightly prioritize the people that we serve. So I would not encourage folks to spend their time crafting heartfelt emails to a delegate who lives hundreds of miles away.

What I can say is that means that you have to network in your advocacy skills. If there is a bill that you really care about that is before a committee where your delegate does not serve, then that's when you start to build those broader statewide networks and rally around issues so that you have someone in that network, who cares about that issue too, and does have their delegates serving on that committee. So that is really the power of grassroots organizing, so that we make sure that we spread out and reach out to people from all corners of the Commonwealth, so that we can use the rightly local rooted system of democracy to influence issues that matter to people all across the state.

CB: So last year, the combination of the legislative session and the special session were almost six months long. Do you think that it's possible in the near future for the legislature to go full-time instead of part-time? Because it's a lot to pack into 30 days.

SH: Yeah, it is. So I'm an active advocate for professionalizing the legislature. A couple pieces worth tossing in the mix there--it was six months long end-to-end. But not all of those days were spent actively convened as a body. So the Senate would, you know, take a week or two off, and then come back and reconvene. And I think that teaches us an important lesson about what a year-round legislature might look like. A lot of what people like about our current citizen legislature is that it keeps us rooted in our communities: we don't just go off to Richmond and forget about the people that we serve. I think what we learned from this last year is that a model where we periodically go to Richmond year-round, but can be in our communities and continue working remotely, might be exactly what works well. You know, I don't think that we need to physically sit in Richmond year-round, to have a year round job for the legislature. I could imagine a model where we go to Richmond for a week, once a month. And then three weeks out of the year, we're back in our home districts, connecting with the people that we serve, and continuing to move bills forward and to meet with advocates and stakeholders. I think something like that should be in our future. Because right now the compressed schedule doesn't just shrink the docket and restrict the number of things that we can tackle--it also robs us a lot of good deliberative time.

There's lots of times in the legislature where I wish that we could put something aside and let it sit and sleep on it and come back to it three weeks later, after everyone's had a chance to gather more information and mull it over. Right now our crude compressed calendar creates this terrible game of chicken during the legislature where all of the most controversial issues, pile up into the last couple days, and then get weaponized against each other, which doesn't create sound public policy. The best thing that would come out of stretching out of this session is reducing the influence of that particular artificial deadline, which I think distorts a lot of policy outcomes. And as you can see from Congress, we would find new ways to distort the process. Even if we're serving year-round, they of course have deadlines of their own. There will always be rules and the rules will always be used for leverage. But I think that we can improve the process by stretching it out more.

CB: In terms of bills that you weren't able to present this session because of the cap. What are you excited about bringing to the legislature in future legislative sessions or special sessions?

SH: You know, the list is long. I have a long list of things that had to be punted to the future. But some of the ones that I think are tops for me: I think that there's a lot more that we can be doing on consumer protection in Virginia. There were a handful of bills that I was invested in that are about disclosures and making it easier for people to know what they're being charged and to cancel unfair contracts. There was work that I was doing with some of our immigration advocates here about making it easier for parents to protect their children in the event that they're deported. That also turns out to intersect with really important work about guardianship for parents who are sick. I think one of the things that COVID exposed in new relief is that Virginia's guardianship laws are underdeveloped. And so we don't have a very good way for someone to temporarily give custodial custody of their kids--say they're going in for surgery or they contract COVID and maybe don't know whether or not they're going to make it out the other side. I think that we can do more, to make it more flexible, to make sure that we're taking care of children in vulnerable circumstances. That was something that I was excited to work on that I'm afraid didn't make it into our seven.

And then there's no shortage of work to be done on confronting our climate crisis. And I think that that has been one of the most heartbreaking projects deferred by the COVID epidemic, is that we had to suddenly start actively working to keep people safe and healthy in the moment and have once again deferred long-term progress on that existential threat.

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NM: Sally Hudson represents the 57th district on the Virginia House of Delegates. Thanks to her for joining us on this week’s show.

My name’s Nathan Moore, and I’m the host of Bold Dominion. Big thanks this week to our producer Charlie Bruce. Find this show online at BoldDominion.org. Go ahead and subscribe… it’s just a click away.

And hey! We’re always on the lookout for topics for future episodes. For real. One of our upcoming episodes will feature a guy who wrote to us a few weeks ago. Send your ideas to our email address -- BoldDominion@virginia.edu. That’s BoldDominion@virginia.edu. Or direct message us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. 

Keep social distancing, y'all. And I’ll talk with you again in two weeks!