Let’s talk jobs. We all know families that are hurting from job losses and businesses struggling to survive the global recession. So how do we get back on our feet and recover from the global recession?
Legislators took an important first step in the House recently. Working in a bipartisan manner, we found a compromise to help laid-off workers get retrained for new careers. Senate Bill 5135 and House Bill 1091 give the state’s businesses a $300 million tax break on unemployment-insurance rates, plus extra benefits and retraining for laid-off workers.
This compromise extends unemployment benefits for 70,000 families statewide. It also gives tax relief to businesses, because without these reforms, employers with no layoffs on their records would have seen a 42 percent increase in their unemployment premiums.
This is great news, and is a shot in the arm for our economy. It will create jobs from Vancouver to Bellingham to Spokane. It’s a testament to bipartisanship and responsible leadership. Our state’s unemployment trust fund is healthy. Thirty other states have exhausted their trust funds and are borrowing from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits to laid-off workers. They’ve borrowed $41 billion as of the end of 2010.
Washington state doesn’t have to borrow. In fact, our healthy trust fund is the reason we can give businesses that $300 million and provide laid-off workers with the retraining benefits they need for new careers.
But this reform is only a first step. It begs a bigger question: What’s our long-term strategy to create jobs in Washington state? Do we race to the bottom by being the cheapest state? Or do we race to the top by being the best-educated, most skilled state in the global marketplace?
The real answer is, “A little bit of both.” We need to trim the budget, and we are. We’ve cut $9.1 billion and are about to cut another $4.5 billion. It’s smart to be efficient. But that doesn’t mean our economic strategy should be a race to bring Washington the lowest-paid jobs in the world. No state has ever slashed and burned its way to prosperity.
Setting the example
Every other nation is trying to compete with America for the best jobs. They’re doing it by building more schools and universities, improving highways, fixing up their ports. They’re trying to create prosperity — to create jobs — by copying us, hoping to win a race to the top for the best jobs in the world.
A race to the bottom isn’t worth winning. We can’t compete by trying to have the lowest-skilled, lowest-wage jobs in the world, not when the minimum wage in one Chinese province is 39 cents an hour.
A race to the top is worthy of our state, and our businesses, and our families. It’s a race we know we can win. Being the best in the world is what’s made America strong for decades. Washington state students regularly post among the best SAT scores in the nation. We’re already ranked as one of the best states in the nation to live, work and run a business.
The right long-term plan is to build on that success, to push for our workers to have the best jobs in the world because they are the most talented, best educated, most productive people in the world.
To win that race, we need the best education system in the world. Workers of all ages need access to education and retraining at community colleges and universities, because the jobs of tomorrow aren’t based on horsepower and factories. They’re based on brainpower. It would be economic suicide to dismantle what our parents and their parents built for us. They created the fine universities, the dams and bridges, the public schools, the fire stations and highways. Our parents sacrificed to build a better Washington for their kids. We must not squander our inheritance.
Let’s keep working together for one Washington where everyone has a fair shot at the American Dream.
Tim Probst of Vancouver is a second-term state representative in the 17th Legislative District.
