ATLANTA – With first-time unemployment claims continuing to fall and more and more businesses reopening, the Georgia Department of Labor is shifting its focus to helping companies fill job openings.
Jobless Georgians filed 25,429 initial unemployment claims last week, down 3,335 from the previous week, the labor department reported Thursday.
As those claims decline, more business owners are coming to the labor department for help finding applicants for open positions, Georgia Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said.
“Our mission is to not only bridge the pay gap for those who are temporarily unemployed, but to also provide reemployment support for those who are looking to reenter the workforce filling the critical vacancies we are seeing in every industry,” Butler said.
“I hear every day from employers who have been forced to reduce business hours, refuse large deliveries and turn down economic opportunities due to the simple fact that they did not have the staff to support them.”
Since the coronavirus pandemic first hit Georgia in mid-March of last year, the labor department has paid out more than $21.2 billion in state and federal unemployment benefits. The agency has processed more than 4.7 million first-time jobless claims during that period, more than during the nine years prior to the pandemic.
Last week, the job sector accounting for the most claims was accommodation and food services with 6,224 claims. The administrative and support services sector was next with 2,083, followed by manufacturing with 1,755.
The labor department has more than 240,000 job listings posted on its EmployGeorgia website, the highest the agency has ever recorded.
Claimants using the site can receive support to upload up to five searchable resumes, job search assistance, career counseling, skills testing, job fair information and job training services.
President Joe Biden touts his first 100 days in office at a rally held in Duluth on April 29, 2021. (Official Biden Twitter video)
The Biden administration is pitching Georgia on a $1.8 trillion plan aimed at helping families cover child-care costs via tax credits, boosting federal funds for college education and creating a national program for paid family leave.
Called the American Families Plan, the family-focused package awaiting consideration in Congress leans on hiking taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations to fund higher child tax credits and earned-income tax credits for low-income families.
It contains dozens of proposals to extend lower health-insurance premiums to many Georgians, increase the minimum wage for child-care workers and kindergarten teachers, prop up funding for free school meals, cover two years of community college tuition and expand paid family leave.
The plan’s tax proposals would help cut taxes or provide credits for an estimated 80% of Georgia families while hiking taxes for fewer than 1% of residents who make up the state’s top earners, said Danny Kanso, a senior policy analyst with the nonprofit Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI).
“The tax measures in these recovery plans really present the greatest opportunity in a generation to cut child poverty and to rebalance the tax code in favor of working people and the middle class,” Kanso said at a news conference Thursday. “Altogether, those provisions far outweigh the revenue-raisers in these bills.”
GBPI representatives also said the plan would help thousands of Georgians maintain health coverage expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, keep shelves stocked for the roughly 57% of families relying on free and reduced-price school meals and boost educational opportunities in a state where two out of three residents lack a bachelor’s degree.
President Joe Biden touted his latest spending package at a rally last week in metro Atlanta where he pledged to avoid raising taxes on lower and middle-class families and urged supporters to back increased taxes on higher earners and companies.
“It’s about time the very wealthy and corporations start paying their fair share,” Biden said at a drive-in rally in Duluth. “It’s as simple as that.”
Republicans have largely slammed the president’s latest spending plan, noting it would add to a set of other high-dollar packages including $1.9 trillion in new COVID-19 emergency aid that Congress passed in March and a $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal Biden is also pushing.
“Make no mistake: Biden is seeking to make the public reliant on the government for every aspect of our lives,” U.S. Rep. Drew Ferguson, R-West Point, wrote in an op-ed this week in the Washington Examiner. “His unabashed ‘big government’ agenda would orient our economy and foreign policy around climate change, include massive tax hikes and pack the Supreme Court, to boot.”
If passed by Congress, Biden’s plan would run in tandem with tax cuts for Georgians and broader paid family leave that state lawmakers passed in the 2021 legislative session.
Gov. Brian Kemp recently signed bills to give Georgians a slight income-tax cut and let foster parents tap into a larger tax credit when adopting children. He also signed legislation allowing state employees and teachers to take up to three weeks of paid parental leave.
Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation Thursday allowing student athletes at Georgia colleges, universities and technical colleges to receive compensation for the use of their name, image and likeness.
The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Chuck Martin, R-Alpharetta, came as schools and the NCAA reckon with a growing push to permit certain kinds of financial benefits for college athletes who are often the focus of lucrative advertising campaigns and video games.
Kemp, a University of Georgia (UGA) alumnus and advocate, said the new allowances on athlete compensation should help give the state a competitive edge in attracting talented players and students from within Georgia and beyond.
“I believe it sets Georgia on the path to accomplish something that quite honestly should have been done a long time ago,” Kemp said during a bill-signing ceremony at UGA Thursday.
“Thanks to [the bill], student athletes from across the country will have Georgia on their mind when they’re looking for a campus and a university that can give them a world-class education but also the chance to compete at the highest levels of college athletics.”
Under the bill, college athletes in Georgia will be required to take five hours of a financial literacy and life skills workshop to ready them for the added burdens of receiving compensation for sports performance.
Schools will also have the ability to require that student athletes pool their compensation and deposit the earnings in an escrow account, from which they cannot withdraw funds until at least one year after they graduate or leave school.
Additionally, the bill bars schools from offering cash or other incentives to high-school recruits and requires sports agents seeking to represent college athletes to obtain the same type of license needed to represent professional athletes.
The new pay rules take effect on July 1 and will remain in place until either mid-2025 or until Congress passes federal legislation allowing for nationwide college-athlete compensation. Several bills have already been introduced in Congress on athlete pay.
So far, the NCAA has largely resisted moves to permit compensation for student athletes, prompting several lawsuits challenging the organization’s authority to block student athletes from being paid despite also profiting from their skills.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments March 31 in a landmark case from California brought by former West Virginia running back Shawne Alston, who sued the NCAA and several college leagues in 2014 for not allowing compensation to pay for costs beyond what his scholarship covered. The court has not yet issued a ruling in the case.
Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation Wednesday allowing restaurants to sell curbside takeaway alcoholic beverages and distillers to sell liquor on their premises in Georgia.
The loosened rules on alcohol sales aim to give Georgia restaurants and alcohol vendors a boost after more than a year of weathering financial losses spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, which industry representatives estimate has wiped out roughly 20% of Georgia’s restaurants.
One measure Kemp signed Wednesday permits restaurants to sell patrons alcohol to-go in tightly sealed containers with takeout food. To-go drinks would also have to be stored in a glove box, locked trunk or behind the back seat while driving.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Matt Brass, R-Newnan, follows legislation Kemp signed last year allowing deliveries of beer, wine and liquor to homes as the pandemic prompted fewer Georgians to dine out, battering local restaurants.
Kemp also signed a bill sponsored by state Rep. Mandi Ballinger, R-Canton, allowing Georgia distilleries to sell liquor for on-site consumption on any day that the city or county in which they are located allows such sales.. Similar on-site sales rules will also apply to malt-beverage brewers under the bill.
Kemp’s signing of the alcohol-focused legislation continued a bill-signing spree this week that saw him also ink legislation allowing state employees and teachers to take up to three weeks of paid parental leave, a bill lowering the age Georgia parents can adopt children from 25 to 21, and a measure toughening penalties for drivers and promoters engaged in illegal street racing.
Kemp signed a package of education bills this week giving veterans an easier path to become teachers and allowing private groups to donate grant funds to struggling public schools. He also signed legislation providing tax breaks to key industries.
The governor is set Thursday to sign legislation permitting Georgia athletes to earn compensation for the use of their “name, image or likeness” by the public, private or technical colleges they attend, pending student athletes complete a financial-literacy workshop and keep their earnings in an escrow account for at least one year after graduating or leaving school.
Kemp is also expected next week to sign high-profile legislation overhauling Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law that was spurred by public outrage over the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery outside Brunswick last year.
Georgia Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – State employees and teachers will be able to take up to three weeks of paid parental leave under legislation Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law Wednesday.
The bill, which sailed through the Georgia Senate unanimously and cleared the state House of Representatives 153-8, will benefit about 246,000 state workers and teachers. It will apply to parents following the birth of a child of their own, an adopted child or a foster-care placement.
“By ensuring state employees can take paid parental time off … we are sending a strong, clear signal that Georgia values every business, company and job creator,” Kemp said during a signing ceremony at the state Capitol.
The legislation was introduced last year as a top priority of House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge. It appeared headed toward passage before the coronavirus pandemic forced the General Assembly into a three-month hiatus.
But when lawmakers returned to the Gold Dome in June of last year to finish the 2020 legislative session, the Senate stripped paid parental leave from the bill and substituted a measure reducing lawmakers’ salaries. The House refused to support the change, and the bill was forced to wait until this year.
Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens, the bill’s chief sponsor, noted Wednesday that then-President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who pushed for paid family leave at the national level, got behind the Georgia legislation last year, helping it gain momentum.
Gaines said he received a flood of e-mails and texts from parents supporting the measure.
“House Bill 146 is a pro-jobs, pro-life and pro-family piece of legislation that is going to make a significant difference for Georgia families,” he said.
Under the measure, full-time employees will become eligible for paid parental leave after six months on the job.
