At the 20 March 2025 meeting of the Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council, the Department introduced another round of extensive, substantive proposed changes to unemployment law.
Note: Despite many of these proposals being repeats from prior proposals, the Department did not include any financial estimates with these current proposals. At the April 17th Council meeting, however, the Department included fiscal estimates. Accordingly, the links to the proposals are to the April 2025 versions and not the March 2025 versions that lack fiscal estimates.
D25-01, Mandatory on-line filing for employers
This proposal is a repeat from 2023 and 2021. As I explained in 2021 for D21-25:
At present, large employers (those with annual unemployment taxes of $10,000 or more) must e-file their reports and e-pay their unemployment taxes.
This proposal would mandate e-filing and e-pay for ALL employers.
The problem is that many one or two person LLCs and other self-employed individuals have no conception of unemployment taxes and the reports that need to be filed. Given the lack of broadband access in the state, this mandate for these small employers is likely difficult to impossible to implement.
Without a broad-based, educational media campaign, this mandatory e-filing will accomplish little more than allowing the Department to levy administrative penalties against small employers who have no idea what is going on and fail to provide their forms and payments via e-file and e-pay. The fact that implementation will be delayed until the Department actually has the technology in place to support this proposal offers little assurance. In short, this proposal should be rejected out-of-hand. After all, those who push for ease-of-use indicate that multiple kinds of access need to be maintained and fully supported. So, mandatory e-filing and e-pay actually runs counter to making unemployment more modern and easier-to-use.
The council previously approved of this proposal, but the legislature took no action on it.
What this proposal ignores is that far too many employers are being hit with penalties and fees for not understanding and having effective on-line access to unemployment right now. Employers are increasingly being hit with penalties and fees which they are only learning about when public levies are being issued.
There were 658 unemployment collection warrants issued in March 2025. At least 500 of these warrants were against employers, and these warrants were typically against small employers or out-of-state employers.
- 2025UC000603 / Dartmouth College in New Hampshire owes $854.00 in taxes, $171.92 in fees, and $10.00 in court fees
- 2025UC000300 / Funimation Productions LLC in Texas owes $116.00 in taxes, $1.94 in interest, $100.00 in penalties ($50 per missed quarter), and $20.53 in fees.
- 2025UC000029 / Ars Child Care Inc. in Eau Claire owes $395.77 in taxes, $6.60 in interest, $737.63 in penalties, and $10.00 in fees.
- 2025UC000020 / Lighthouse Lakesresort LLC in Lake Geneva owes $522.15 in taxes, $22.19 in interest, $100 in penalties ($50 per missed quarter), and $10 in fees.
- 2025UC000077 / Westfahl Plumbing Co. in Brookfield owes $4.26 in taxes, $0.04 in interest, $200.00 in penalties ($50 per missed quarter), and $10 in fees.
- 2025UC000053 / Procubed LLC in Kenosha owes $56.22 in taxes, $0.94 in interest, $100 in penalties ($50 per missed quarter), and $39.06 in fees.
Note: While the $50 penalty per quarter can be waived, too many employers are not aware of that option.
While large employers have paid representatives to monitor and respond to Department inquiries, small employers too often have no one managing their unemployment accounts. As a result, reporting discrepancies are not caught until fees, penalties, and interest are charged. In my ten plus years of representing employers in unemployment matters, I have yet to come across a small employer that has any process or even access set up for online management of their unemployment account prior to my representation. But, with the push for online-only filing, more and more small employers are being hit with these fees and penalties for reasons that they do not understand and are not even aware of until these warrants are issued.
D25-02, Increased and expanded mis-classification penalties
This proposal is a repeat from 2023 and 2021. As I explained in 2021 for D21-26:
This proposal seeks to replace the token employer penalties for mis-classifying construction workers (1) with penalties that at least some have some dentures to them and (2) to expand this issue to all industries rather than limiting it to just construction.
The Advisory Council at the urging of Mark Reihl, then the head of the carpenters’ union in Wisconsin (and now division director for unemployment) originally approved the original penalties proposed by the labor caucus.
- $500 civil penalty for each employee who is misclassified, but not to exceed $7,500 per incident.
- $1,000 criminal fine for each employee who is misclassified, subject to a maximum fine of $25,000 for each violation, but only if the employer has previously been assessed a civil penalty for misclassified workers.
- $1,000 civil penalty for each individual coerced to adopt independent contractor status, up to $10,000 per calendar year.
D21-26 at 1 [and D23-02 at 1, D25-02 at 1].
With this proposal, the Department explains:
The proposal removes the $7,500 and $10,000 limitations on these penalties and provides that the penalties double for each act occurring after the date of the first determination of a violation. The proposal also removes the limitations on the types of employers to which the penalties apply, allowing them to be assessed against any type of employer that violates the above prohibitions.
D21-26 at 4 [and D23-02 at 5; similar language in D25-02 at 1].
BUT, the intent that needs to be shown for these mis-classification penalties remains unchanged. Per Wis. Stat. § 108.221(1)(b):
(b) The department shall consider the following nonexclusive factors in determining whether an employer described under par. (a) knowingly and intentionally provided false information to the department for the purpose of misclassifying or attempting to misclassify an individual who is an employee of the employer as a nonemployee:
- Whether the employer was previously found to have misclassified an employee in the same or a substantially similar position.
- Whether the employer was the subject of litigation or a governmental investigation relating to worker misclassification and the employer, as a result of that litigation or investigation, received an opinion or decision from a federal or state court or agency that the subject position or a substantially similar position should be classified as an employee.
Under this standard, it is well nigh impossible to charge an employer with mis-classification for a first-time violation. On the other hand, claimants are given no such leeway for their claim-filing mistakes. As noted above with proposal D21-10 (SUTA dumping), claimants who have filed for unemployment insurance previously and been given notice to read the claimants’ handbook are presumed to know everything about how to file an unemployment claim and to not make any claim-filing mistakes. But, here, employers are not liable for mis-classification (a far more serious problem economically) until after their first instance of mis-classification. In other words, these mis-classification penalties can only apply to employers when prosecuted a second time for the same mis-classification. Having two bites of the apple sure is nice.
Either employers should be held to the same claim-filing standards as employees, or the intent requirements used against employees for their claim-filing mistakes needs to be seriously redone.
The 2025 proposal does NOT include the intent definition from the 2021 and 2023 proposals. So, employers could well find themselves subject to the same presumption of fraudulent intent that currently applies to claimants when they make claim-filing mistakes.
D25-03, Ending the waiting week
This proposal is a repeat from 2021. As I explained in 2021 for D21-19:
The waiting week was enacted as part of the 2011 budget act, 2011 Wis. Act 32 and without any input from the Advisory Council.
The concept of a waiting week exists because state unemployment agencies originally could not act quickly on a claim for benefits, and so a waiting week was needed to give the state agency time to process the necessary paperwork. With the advent of claim-filing by phone, however, that additional time was no longer needed. The waiting week effectively became a vehicle for reducing the total amount of benefits paid out to a claimant, since claimants did not receive any unemployment benefits for the first week of their claim.
The Department estimates that the waiting week costs claimants $26.1 million each year. D21-19 at 3. Given the purpose of unemployment benefits to provide immediate economic stimulus to workers in time of need after losing their jobs, a waiting week makes no sense.
The current financial estimate is that elimination of the waiting week would have a $12 million annual impact on the trust fund. That is, the waiting week at present means Wisconsin workers as a whole get $12 million in unemployment benefits less each calendar year.
D25-04, Increasing the weekly benefit rate
This proposal is a revamp from a 2021 proposal. See this discussion of D21-22.
The proposal is to raise the maximum weekly benefit rate to $497 in 2026 and then in subsequent years to adjust the maximum for inflation.
At present, Wisconsin is now officially far behind other states in the midwest, as Michigan has now raised its maximum weekly benefit rate from $362 (and is now including additional monies for dependents for those that do not qualify for the maximum weekly benefit rate).
State Max. WBR Max. w/ dependents
IL $593 $808
IN $390 $390 (no dependency allowances)
IA $602 $602
MI $446 $446
MN $914 $914
OH $561 $757
WI $370 $370 (no dependency allowances)
Unlike in Michigan (where the recently passed increase will have retroactive effect to Jan. 1st of this year), the proposed increase to $497 in Wisconsin would not become effective until January of 2026.
The current maximum of $370 is about one-third of the average weekly wage of $1175 in 2023 in Wisconsin. The fiscal estimate is that this proposal would lead to around $131 million more in unemployment benefits being paid to Wisconsin workers. Given that $366.7 million in unemployment benefits were paid out in all of 2024 with the current maximum of $3270 per week, this increase in unemployment benefits amounts to more than one-third of what is currently being paid to Wisconsin workers. As such, this proposed increase indicates that the level of unemployment benefits currently available in Wisconsin is far below what workers are earning.
D25-05, Increasing the wage cap on benefit eligibility
This proposal is a modification of the proposal from 2021. Rather than repealing the wage cap completely, the current proposal is to raise the wage cap to $692 and then index it to inflation.
As I explained in 2021 for D21-21:
Right now, a hard cap of $500 per week is written into unemployment law. This cap was first proposed by the Department in D12-18, which the Advisory Council adopted at their 21 Feb. 2013 meeting.
In light of Wisconsin’s partial wage formula, a claimant with a weekly benefit rate of $370 could in theory have as much as $574 in wages and still qualify for at least $5 in unemployment benefits. D21-21 at 1. In other words, the partial wage formula indicates that anyone with $575 or more in wages would NOT receive any unemployment benefits.
As a consequence, the $500 cutoff actually discourages some work, as any employee who receives $500 or more in wages loses all unemployment benefits. For instance, a person with a WBR of $370 who earns $550 in wages would receive $22 in unemployment benefits that week, if the $500 wage cap was eliminated.
In other states, the gap between earnings and unemployment eligibility is called an “earnings disregard.” In some of these states, a worker who earns just $200 in a week loses unemployment eligibility dollar for dollar, so the earnings disregard in those states is sizable. See Massachusetts, for example, in this table. Because of Wisconsin’s partial wage formula, the earnings disregard in Wisconsin is limited to this $500 wage cap and only applies for claimants receiving the highest weekly benefit rate.
So, at present this $500 wage cap has a very limited effect. But, should the weekly benefit even be increased, it will become a major problem. And, as indicated in the [previous] proposal, Wisconsin now has the second-lowest weekly benefit rate in the mid-west. So, this artificial cap needs to go if Wisconsin is going to raise its weekly benefit rate.
Finally, as noted by the Department, D21-21 at 3, the eligibility ban when working 32 or more hours in a week remains in place.
The wage cap should just be eliminated rather than raised, as a wage cap runs counter to Wisconsin’s partial eligibility formula that encourages unemployed people to accept part-time work. The fiscal estimate demonstrates the complexity of keeping the wage cap in place:
It is important to note that changing the statutory weekly wage cap does not change the maximum earnings allowable under the partial wage formula. If earnings reduce a payment below the minimum $5 per week, no payment is made for that week. Assuming there is no earnings cap, for a $370 maximum weekly benefit rate, a claimant may earn up to $574.77 and still remain eligible for a $5 payment if they were working fewer than 32 hours. Analyzing all weekly claims that reported wages and hours worked in 2024 and assuming all weeks qualified for the maximum weekly benefit rate, there were 11,574 weekly claims that would receive a payment at the higher weekly wage cap after considering the 32-hour limit. These weeks would receive, on average, a partial weekly benefit of $33, leading to an increase in UI benefit payments of approximately $385,000 annually. Of this amount, $25,000 would be expected to be paid by reimbursable employers. UI tax contributions would be expected to increase by $120,000 annually. This results in an expected reduction in the UI Trust Fund of $240,000 annually.
D25-06, Creating an SSDI offset
Here, the Department acknowledges that the current SSDI eligibility ban has been found to discriminate against disabled workers. See Bemke v. Pechacek (17 July 2024) and SSDI eligibility ban in Wisconsin is illegal. But, the Department is attempting to create a new, de facto eligibility ban through a financial offset of SSDI benefits against any unemployment benefits a claimant might be eligible for. In general, a disabled person who receives $1000 in monthly SSDI benefits would then have a $250 per week offset applied to any weekly unemployment benefits that person might be eligible for. Such an offset would lead to claimants who receive SSDI benefits never actually receiving any unemployment benefits.
In essence, the Department is recreating the discrimination of the SSDI eligibility ban through a new, offset mechanism.
Offset is, in effect, an eligibility ban
First, the example the Department uses in its proposal is of a claimant who is getting $1000 in SSDI benefits per month being eligible for a weekly benefit rate of $300 in unemployment benefits. The problem here is that disabled workers nearly universally do NOT earn enough in wage work to get a weekly benefit rate that high. Almost all of the disabled people I know qualify for weekly benefit rates under $100 per week. A couple of other weekly benefit rates I have seen for disabled workers are $167 and $190, and the highest weekly benefit rate I have ever seen for a disabled worker is $208.
Given that the median monthly SSDI benefit in Wisconsin as of December 2023 is $1404 (around $351 per week in SSDI benefits), see Annual Statistical Report on Social Security Disability Insurance Program, 2023, there is simply no way that any disabled workers would have sufficient earnings to qualify for any unemployment under this offset proposal.
Note: the current maximum weekly benefit rate for unemployment is $370, just $19 more than the median weekly SSDI benefit.
In other words, this proposed offset would end up, in practical terms, denying all unemployment benefits to all disabled workers who receive SSDI benefits. The fiscal estimate makes this result crystal clear.
In 2024, the average SSDI payment in Wisconsin was $1,500 per month. The average weekly SSDI payment for UI purposes is calculated at $346.20 per week. This weekly amount will in many cases fully reduce the UI benefit a SSDI recipient can receive.
There are strict federal limits on income a SSDI claimant can earn from employment (labeled Substantial Gainful Activity) while maintaining benefits. For disabled SSDI recipients, the maximum amount is $1,620 per month and for blind SSDI recipients, it is $2,700 per month.
If a disabled SSDI recipient earns the maximum amount of wages allowed by federal law each month, they would qualify for a $259 weekly benefit rate. That benefit rate would likely lead to no UI weekly benefits payable, given an average $1,500 monthly SSDI payment and a weekly reduction of $346.20 per week.
* * *In summary, most SSDI claimants will not be able to receive UI benefits. While some may be able to receive UI benefits, it is expected that the weekly UI payment would be small. Given that many claimants would not qualify for any UI payment on a weekly basis and that those who do qualify would receive small payments, this proposal is expected to cause a small reduction in the UI Trust Fund of indeterminate size.
D25-06 at 4-5 (emphasis supplied).
Offsets for SSDI benefits do not exist elsewhere
Second, no state at present has a 100%, ever-lasting SSDI offset similar to what is being proposed here. Indeed, no other state currently has any kind of offset for SSDI benefits.
Here is what has happened in other states that previously had some kind of SSDI offset for unemployment benefits.
Colorado
In Cericalo v. Indus. Claim Appeals Office of State of Colo., 114 P.3d 100, 102 (Colo. App. 2005), the court held that a 50% offset against SSDI benefits was valid per the general, FUTA (Federal Unemployment Tax Act) provisions that allow for offsets of Social Security benefits.
Colorado has since repealed any offset of all Social Security benefits (regular and disability) when receiving unemployment benefits. See Col.L. 2009, (HB 09-1076), ch. 408, p. 2248, § 1, effective June 2, 2009 (repealing 8-73-110(3)(a)).
Minnesota
Minnesota originally had an SSDI eligibility ban like Wisconsin’s that was found to discriminate against the disabled in Huston v. Comm’r of Emp. & Econ. Dev., 672 N.W.2d 606 (Minn. Ct. App. 2003). Minnesota also at the time had a 50% offset provision for all Social Security benefits. Minn. Stat. § 268.085, subd. 4(b) (“There shall be deducted from an applicant’s weekly unemployment benefit amount 50 percent of the weekly equivalent of the primary social security old age or disability benefit the applicant has received, has filed for, or intends to file for, with respect to that week.”).
In Baldridge v. Dep’t of Emp. & Econ. Dev., No. A13-1256, 2014 WL 1758274 (Minn. Ct. App. May 5, 2014), the 50% offset provision as it applied to SSDI benefits was challenged, and the court held then that the general offset provisions for Social Security benefits continued to apply to the claimant and so did not illegally discriminate because of disability.
Note: The offset applied in Baldridge, it should be noted, because there was a one month gap between when his SSDI benefits started and the wages on which his unemployment benefits were based. That is, Minnesota’s SSDI offset provision was limited at the time to newly eligible SSDI recipients for which their base period wages reached back further than their SSDI eligibility. See Baldridge at 4. Because the claimant in Baldridge was new to SSDI benefits, he also was not eligible for the 0% offset available to those individuals who received SSDI benefits each month they were working. See Minn. Stat. § 268.085, subd. 4(c) (2012). That is, when Baldridge was decided, Minnesota’s SSDI offset provision did NOT apply to anyone receiving SSDI benefits for two years or more (i.e., when SSDI benefits predated an employee’s unemployment benefit year).
In 2021, Minnesota repealed completely the offset provision for Social Security benefits in Minn.Stat. § 268.085, subd. 4, see 2021 Minn. 1st Special Sess. c.10 art 4 § 9, and removed any deduction for SSDI benefits in Minn. Stat. § 268.085, subd. 4a, when unemployment claimants have been found eligible for SSDI benefits when they were working or a medical provider certifies the claimant as able and available for work, see 2021 Minn. 1st Special Sess. c.10, art 4 § 3.
Utah
In Florence v. Dep’t of Workforce Servs., 35 P.3d 1148 (Utah Ct. App. 2001), the court held that a general pension offset that included 100 percent of Social Security benefits also applied to SSDI benefits. Florence, 35 P.3d at ¶9.
Utah has since amended this offset requirement to a 50 percent offset for Social Security benefits in 2003, Utah Code § 35A-4-401(2)(c)(ii), and to 0% after 2003 (as all Social Security benefits are re-classified as a retirement benefit) for unemployment benefits, Utah Code § 35A-4-401(2)(c)(iii).
Virgina
In Virginia Employment Comm’n v. Nunery, 24 Va. App. 617, 484 S.E.2d 609 (1997), the court held that an offset of SSDI benefits was allowed pursuant to the general offset of Social Security benefits then in place in Virginia state law.
In 2003, Virginia amended the offset provision in § 60.2-604 for Social Security benefits to 50%, 2003 Va.L. ch.534, and eliminated the offset completely via 2005 Va.L. ch.1 (“the weekly benefit amount payable to an individual for any week shall not be reduced by any amount of Social Security Act or Railroad Retirement Act retirement benefits received by such individual and attributable to such week”).
All states (other than Wisconsin) at present
In light of this history no state has any offset provision for SSDI benefits that applies to unemployment benefits. This Department proposal is a radical change from what other states have done.
New reporting requirement
Third, the proposal makes disabled workers responsible for reporting their SSDI benefits to the Department WHEN the Department already has direct access to that benefit information from the Social Security Administration. As such, claimants who lack access to their SSDI paperwork (which are the majority of SSDI recipients who, after all, are generally not lawyers themselves and who mostly deal with the Social Security Administration through phone calls) will not have the correct amounts to report to the Department, and the Department will invariably then charge these disabled workers with unemployment fraud.
Accordingly, the offset provision being proposed here is just another mechanism for making unemployment benefits into a weapon to be used against workers.
D25-07, Repealing Department drug testing requirements
This proposal is, generally, a repeat from 2021. As I explained in 2021 for D21-16:
This proposal repeals the drug testing provisions the Walker administration kept trying to institute. Recall that the drug testing efforts came in three parts: (1) voluntary employer testing and reporting, (2) mandatory testing of claimants based on to-be-determined federally designated occupations for testing, and (3) mandatory testing of claimants based on a future, state-based list of designated occupations. Only the voluntary employer testing and reporting was ever implemented.
The big news here is that as of 31 March 2021, the Department has received 171 drug test reports (either a failed test or failing to take a test) from potential employers. Previously, the Department had reported none or just a couple of voluntary testing reports from employers. In any case, the impact of these 171 voluntary employer reports remains nil. “No claimants have been determined to be ineligible for UI benefits under the pre-employment drug testing statutes and rules and denied benefits because of the employers’ reports of a failed or refused drug test as a condition of an offer of employment.” D21-16 at 1. So, there has been no opportunity for claimants to maintain their eligibility by enrolling a drug treatment program at the state’s expense.
Because employers have no idea of whether a job applicant is receiving or not receiving unemployment benefits OR because employers are failing to provide the necessary drug-testing paperwork and follow the necessary protocols for reporting a drug test OR a combination of these two factors, the voluntary drug testing has been a complete bust. In more than five years, this effort has not led to a single disqualification or enrollment in a drug treatment program. Ending a program that is doing nothing should make sense.
For this 2025 proposal, the news regarding any voluntary employer drug-testing reports is the same: “No claimants have been determined to be ineligible for UI benefits under the pre-employment drug testing statutes and rules and denied benefits because of the employers’ reports of a failed drug test as a condition of an offer of employment.” D25-07 at 1.
With nothing happening in six years now in regards to unemployment drug testing, there is no reason to keep this drug testing around.
D25-08, Undoing the Bevco decision on absenteeism
This proposal arises from the recent decision in Bevco Precision Mfg. Co. v. LIRC, 2024 WI App 54, that re-applied the holding in Beres that any employer absenteeism policy can determine misconduct regardless of why an employee missed worked.
As noted by the Commission in its briefing in Beres, this employer-determined misconduct for non-intentional absences (in both Beres and Stangel, the employees were absent because of illnesses over which they had no control) ran the risk of Wisconsin being found by the US Department of Labor to no longer be in compliance with federal requirements for unemployment. That lack of compliance could well lead to Wisconsin employers losing a [FUTA] tax credit and seeing their federal unemployment taxes jumping from a 0.5% to 7.0% tax rate — quite a jump.
Beres, absenteeism, and a temporary change of heart. For this reason, both the Commission and the Department petitioned for supreme court review in Bevco, but those petitions were denied.
The Department hopes to fix this non-compliance with federal law via this proposed change. In light of this ticking time bomb for employers’ FUTA tax credits, the everyone should earnestly support this proposal.
This 2025 proposal also acknowledges reality and designates that off-duty use of marijuana is no longer disqualifying drug use. That is, marijuana will be treated like alcohol, and a positive test result will no longer automatically mean misconduct has been committed. For marijuana use to count as misconduct, there needs to be evidence that the marijuana was used while working.
D25-09, Repealing the substantial fault disqualification
This proposal is a repeat from 2021. As I explained in 2021 for D21-17:
This proposal seeks to repeal the substantial fault disqualification. There are two issues with this proposal, however.
First, the Advisory Council previously rejected substantial fault when it was originally proposed. It was the Joint Finance Committee that went around the Advisory Council and which included substantial fault in the state budget. So, the Advisory Council does not need to approve of this repeal. It was already rejected, and the rejection should be included as a matter of course.
Second, court decisions in Operton v. LIRC, 2017 WI 46, and Easterling v. LIRC, 2017 WI App 18, have limited the scope of substantial fault in important ways from how the Department applies this disqualification. But, the Department continues to ignore those court precedents. Indeed, as of May 2021, I have come across two cases of employees disqualified for substantial fault because of unintentional mistakes where the mistakes in question are nearly identical to the mistakes in Operton (inadvertent job mistakes) and Easterling (unintentional mistakes while attempting to satisfy employer demands).
The fiscal estimate reveals the impact of the substantial fault disqualification on unemployment claims in Wisconsin:
There was an annual average of 1,428 substantial fault decisions that denied benefits for the years 2022 to 2024. With the elimination of substantial fault decisions, these would now be situations where benefits were allowed. Using the 2024 average weekly benefit amount of $347 per week and the average duration of 12.2 weeks in 2024, the expected additional benefit payments is $6.0 million annually. Accounting for an estimated $400,000 of reimbursable benefit payments and $1.8 million in additional tax revenue leads to a reduction in the UI Trust Fund by $3.8 million annually.
D25-09 at 4. Since the Advisory Council previously rejected this proposed change, there is no dispute at least before the Advisory Council that this disqualification should be repealed immediately.
D25-10, Repealing certain suitable work changes
This proposal is a repeat from 2021. As I explained in 2021 for D21-23:
Here, the Department proposes two changes. First, the Department wants to expand the canvassing period from six weeks to eleven weeks.
The canvassing period is the time when you can reject a job offer which is a lower grade of skill or at a significantly lower rate of pay (less than 75%) than you had on one or more recent jobs without losing your eligibility for benefits. See Tips for filing for unemployment benefits in Wisconsin for more information about your canvassing period.
Second, the Department proposes expanding the trial time period for quitting a job without being disqualified from receiving unemployment benefits from 30 days to ten weeks (the original time period). The Advisory Council originally approved of the change from ten weeks to 30 days.
This trial time period provides various ways for an employee to still qualify for unemployment benefits when quitting a job regardless of the employee’s actual reason. The main reason found in this category usually is that the job fails to meet established labor market standards (e.g., wages are 25% or less than what is normally paid in that specific labor market for that occupation). But, any reason that would have allowed the employees to refuse the job offer in the first place as well as any reason for quitting the job with good cause applies here. Only the last reason — having good cause for quitting the job — is still available to employees after the trial period has expired.
This 2025 proposal is essentially the same as the 2021 proposal, except that the canvassing period is being extended to ten weeks instead of eleven. The fiscal estimate shows that suitable work disqualifications effect 219 claimants a year. D25-10 at 5.
D25-11, Expanding the spouse relocation quit exception
This proposal is a repeat from 2021. As I explained in 2021 for D21-18:
This proposal restores this quit exception to allow any claimant who has to quit a job because his or her spouse has to relocate. Prior to 2013, Wisconsin allowed claimants to receive unemployment benefits when they had to relocate because of a spouse transferring to another job for any reason. In proposal D12-19, the Department limited this quit exception to the spouses of military personnel who had to relocate.
So, this proposal restores the expansive nature of this quit exception.
The problem here, like with substantial fault, is that the Advisory Council previously rejected this Department proposal to limit this quit exception to the spouses of military personnel. Here is what the Advisory Council actually agreed to back in 2013. So, this proposed change should be included as a matter of course in the council’s agreed-upon bill.
The fiscal estimate, D25-11 at 3, showcases how the number of initial claims have plummeted over the years. In 2011 — when spouses were NOT disqualified for relocating with their spouses — there were 417 claims under this quit exception. In light of the current number of claims being filed in Wisconsin, there are expected to be only 147 claims under this exception, nearly a third of the number in 2011.
D25-12, Repealing the lame duck work search and work registration changes
This proposal is a repeat from 2021. As I explained in 2021 for D21-20:
The lame duck laws, see 2017 Wis. Act 370 for the unemployment changes, that were enacted after Scott Walker lost his re-election bid, moved the Department’s work search and work registration requirements from Department regulations and into statutory law. That is, Republicans were so concerned about making sure these obstacles for unemployment eligibility remained in place that they made them statutory rather just a regulation that the new administration might then revise.
So, this proposal restores what existed before the lame duck changes and gives the Department some additional flexibility in how work search and work registration requirements are administered.