New Jersey Labor Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo’s Prepared Remarks to State Legislative Budget Committees

TRENTON – “Good morning, members of the Committee.

For the past three years, I’ve come before this Committee to talk about the challenges we faced managing through an economic crisis.

Today, I’m here to talk about recovery. Our economy and unemployment numbers are currently in good shape, but it’s about more than numbers. It’s about our residents – every person who needs to take time off from work to care for themselves or a loved one; every employer who needs help recruiting and training staff; and every worker who lost their job and faces the uncertainties of unemployment.

We must restore the faith and trust of our claimants, and all of you, which is why we listen to every single story, and take action not only to solve problems, but work to prevent them in the first place. We owe it to our claimants to learn, improve, and make this a smoother process.

During the pandemic, whether at a press conference or here in this seat, I would remind folks that – pre-COVID – New Jersey led the nation in percentage of unemployed workers who received benefits – a metric the U.S. Department of Labor refers to as the recipiency rate. I repeated many times our goal was to return to that top spot.

To be honest though, it didn’t feel like it would ever happen. At the peak of the pandemic – we were ranked number 38 in the country. While that low rank was likely due to bad data reporting from other states, it certainly made the top spot feel far away.

Because of the determination and innovation of our amazing staff, New Jersey once again has the top recipiency rate in the country.

That’s number 1 – out of 53 states and jurisdictions – meaning a worker is more likely to receive their unemployment insurance (UI) benefits if they live in New Jersey than in any other state.

We work to make as many claimants eligible as we can – not find ways to deny them. Often that takes time, I don’t need to tell any of you that. But I’m pleased to say, in 2023, we’re talking about a much stronger economy and far fewer unemployed workers.

By last April, we had regained all the private sector jobs lost to the pandemic. Today, our unemployment rate sits at 3.5 percent – same as pre-pandemic.

We now have more people working – and more employers – than at any point in our history. Our labor participation rate approached 65 percent in March, the highest in about a decade.

Our strong worker protections you put in place – like a higher minimum wage, paid sick days, and expanded family leave – are contributing to year-over-year employment growth. Strong worker benefits and protections are not a detriment to employment, as naysayers often claim. Quite the opposite. The data here is clear: In the past five years, the number of employers in New Jersey has grown by nearly 18 percent, with a remarkable increase of 26 percent amongst the smallest – those with less than five workers.

Thanks to these proactive measures, our state is not only stronger, it’s fairer, too.

And we’re not slowing down.

Our department has more on its plate than ever – with 110 new laws signed over the past five years. Thanks to this Legislature and our Governor, that’s nearly double the number of labor-related laws passed in the prior eight years.

Worker Protections

Thanks to increases in benefit rates and our intensified outreach efforts, we paid about $1 billion dollars last year in Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) and Family Leave Insurance (FLI) benefits. That’s a 250 percent increase in FLI benefits paid over the past three years.

To help spread the word about earned sick leave and paid family and medical leave, we distributed more than a million dollars through our Cultivating Access, Rights, and Equity (CARE) grant to team up with community organizations to increase equitable access to our benefits and protections.

Guided by these principles of equity, we’re playing crucial roles in setting up Civil Service’s State as a Model Employer of People with Disabilities (SAME) program statewide. This program ensures advancement for people with disabilities and a more equitable and inclusive State workforce.

We’ve taken significant actions to ensure employees are getting the compensation and benefits they’ve earned, and we’ve put employers on notice when it comes to compliance.

Last fall, our Unemployment Trust Fund received a $100 million payment from a popular rideshare company after we uncovered nearly 300,000 instances of workers wrongfully classified as independent contractors. It was the largest such payment in New Jersey history, and probably the country.

A few weeks later, we announced a landmark child labor settlement with Chipotle Restaurants, which paid close to $8 million – and, importantly, agreed to a first-of-its-kind compliance plan at all 85 of its New Jersey locations.

Actions like this not only benefit our workers, they also support small and homegrown businesses. If the small businesses we support on Main Street can sustain their workers and follow the law, so can national chains and corporations.

Last year, we collected a record $3 million dollars in fines and penalties for lack of Workers’ Compensation coverage, which is important not only to ensure workers are properly protected, but because lack of coverage is often a sign of worker misclassification.

Thanks to your bipartisan efforts, our new Office of Strategic Enforcement and Compliance is targeting industries with a history of violations and with workers least likely to file a complaint. This whole-of-government approach allows us to serve and protect our residents even more effectively, while also making it easier for us to work with employers so they: 1) know the law, and; 2) know it’s worthwhile to follow the law.

This goes for out-of-state employers as well, who can’t escape enforcement by hopping state lines. Just recently, Governor Murphy and Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro announced we’ll be forming an interstate task force to combat wage theft and worker misclassification.

We want all New Jersey workers and employers to know we’re looking out for their best interests.

As was the case in our recent initiative involving the retail laundromat industry – where we found workers at 80 percent of locations were not receiving earned sick leave. We’re not just assessing a penalty and calling it a day – we’re engaging with the employer community and with employee advocates to bring compliance and sustainable change.

This outreach, communication, representation, and enforcement — it’s all producing meaningful results:

• In 2022, close to $2 million in misclassification penalties were put back in the pockets of almost 2,000 workers.
• One hundred eight (108) contractors were debarred for prevailing wage violations last year. Or to put it another way, for stealing public dollars meant for the women and men working on government-funded construction projects.
• A new database will soon be launched, allowing for public works contractors to submit certified payrolls to the department and public bodies, streamlining the process, improving compliance with prevailing wage law and the Diane B. Allen Equal Pay Act, and bringing greater transparency to the public.
• One hundred three (103) stop-work orders have been issued since 2019 to ensure employers are complying with the laws you worked hard to enact.
• Collaborations with the Attorney General’s Office have built impact cases to change industries – benefitting whole classes of workers and leveling the playing field for employers. Using criminal enforcement as tool to pursue the worst actors has resulted in multiple indictments.

Our department ensures those who put their sweat, blood, and tears into earning a living are getting every dollar they’re entitled to.

But we also help the unemployed or underemployed acquire the skills needed to attain the dignity of work.

Workforce Development

Our Workforce Development team has served more than 900,000 customers since August 2020, when we expanded our services to further our reach during the pandemic.

Our Workforce Development Partnership Fund (WDPF) allocation has increased to $27.5 million, and we have big plans for it, including but not limited to, improving our training infrastructure, launching our Economic Research Unit to better serve our stakeholders, and doing our part to support gender pay equity and the WorkFirst New Jersey program, among many, many others.

This is on top of building and maintaining our existing career and business services, expanding the Governor’s Return and Earn program, implementing the two-year pilot program for Lifelong Learning Accounts, and continuing our success with apprenticeships.

And soon, we’ll be playing a vital role in our residents’ career journeys from the very start.

As of June 1st, our department is absorbing responsibilities for providing working papers to minors. No longer will this be tasked to the 600-plus school district administrators. This process will now be online at MyWorkingPapers.nj.gov.

This shift will allow us to deliver important information to young workers and their parents, like career paths, training opportunities, and apprenticeships.

Apprenticeship has been one of our greatest tools for developing our workforce in the areas we need it most. With your support, and the commitment of Governor Murphy, we’ve seen a 93 percent increase in registered apprenticeship programs since January 2018.

Over that same time period, we’ve invested about $30 million dollars to make a decades-long impact to our workers, our economy, and our infrastructure. Apprenticeship programs are revitalizing our health care system, building up our clean energy sector, and we’re developing the pipelines to strengthen the early childhood care and education workforce.

We want everyone to have access to these training opportunities and quality jobs, so we’re launching a new suite of tools to help with that.

Career Central – which can now be beta tested at MyCareer.nj.gov – is a comprehensive set of job-seeker tools using real-time data to help individuals identify, train for, and climb a career ladder. This gives workers and employers a single point of entry to employment resources and career choices.

We’ve made incredible progress in making sure all workers have opportunity, dignity, and stability. But if one area sticks out as demanding innovation, it’s customer service.

Customer Service

We owe it to our claimants – to your constituents – to make changes and improvements, by any means necessary, so they never have to struggle or be frustrated again. First and foremost, that means getting clear, concise, timely information to our customers every step of the way.

Since we resumed in-person unemployment services about a year ago, we’ve met face-to-face with over 100,000 claimants. That’s more than triple the in-person appointments in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut combined.

We’re focusing on how we can best interpret the confusing federal regulations for the average New Jerseyan. We’re engaging with actual residents for feedback as they test our solutions. Our vendors and agents are sitting side-by-side with each other and with individual users to determine how we make this process better. We’ve sat one-on-one with Spanish-speaking residents to ensure we’re translating everything correctly – word-by-word. Spanish-speakers make up 95 percent of our callers who speak a language other than English, so that’s where we started. This is all part of our pilot program, and we hope to use these same translation efforts for other languages as we progress.

We’re updating our correspondence to remove government jargon and make next steps clear. Dozens of letters and emails are being overhauled, covering everything from dependency benefits to overpayment waivers to appeals notices. To anyone who has ever received a head-scratching email from a government agency – this is a big deal.

These efforts are part of a larger plan to decrease wait times and give customers easy access to their claims, which is one of the biggest complaints we’ve heard… that workers don’t know what’s going on with their claim or what to do next.

Our updated website will allow claimants to check their claim status – with clear information and self-serve tasks like resetting a PIN or applying for an overpayment waiver. Previously, a claimant would fill in eight different fields to access their claim or 1099. Now, they only need to complete two fields – significantly decreasing the chance for error.

To achieve these updates, we’re remodeling the backend of our applications along with the customer-facing side. This flexible programming lets us add new features in a matter of hours – not years.

Changes we’re looking forward to in the near future include:

• the ability to confirm identity verification status and review outstanding requests for information like e-Adjudication;
• more detailed status updates – showing where a claim is in the review process;
• payment history;
• and other self-serve options to provide claim management ability to our claimants.

These tools, developed with user feedback, will also reduce the need for agent intervention. Improving transparency into claim status, and providing more claims management tools, helps ensure timely payments of UI benefits.

We’re doing everything we can to be responsive to our customers. We onboarded a third-party vendor to help us in the temporary disability and family leave call centers, and early results indicate we’re answering 76 percent more calls each day than before. Of the calls that are escalated, 98 percent are being resolved that same day. I’m proud of this customer service milestone. And it’s only going to get better as we work on modernizing our TDI and FLI systems alongside UI.

We’re doing everything we can to be responsive to you and your staff as well. Since the onset of the pandemic, we’ve responded to more than 150,000 Legislative and Congressional inquiries. This has helped us bring needed information to countless constituents.

In closing, I have to take a moment to thank our team – and not just the people in the room today. This department, as a whole, has given its all to get us through the worst unemployment crisis in memory, and now, even though economic numbers have stabilized, they are throwing their hearts and souls into bringing long-needed change.

To all of you – I appreciate your kinship in the worst of times and am glad to be here with you for all the good days on the horizon.

Thank you, and I look forward your questions.”

–AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY