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The argument made by two south Jersey mayors who want to prohibit seasonal workers from collecting unemployment doesn’t hold salt water, said one employer, who insists it won’t save the money supporters of the proposal say it will.
“I think it’s the wrong answer to saving money,” Tony Cavalier, chief of the North Wildwood Beach Patrol, told the Star-Ledger Statehouse Bureau.
Many lifeguards, badge checkers and other public works employees at the Jersey Shore work from May until September and then collect unemployment until the following season.
“There’s no way they make it if they didn’t get unemployment,” Cavalier said. “It would put them in a bad economic way if they lost unemployment.”
He added that the practice is “a way of life in the shore towns.”
But the mayors of economically strapped Cape May Point and Cape May City say the intention of unemployment insurance is to help people who unexpectedly lose their jobs, not those who know their jobs will end on a certain date.
“When you know when the job’s going to start and when it’s going to be completed, a definite employment period, unemployment should not be applied,” said Cape May Point Mayor Carl Schupp to reporter Megan DeMarco of the Star-Ledger. “We don’t think that’s right.”
Schupp and Cape May City Mayor Edward J. Mahaney Jr. proposed a resolution at the League of Municipalities Conference in November asking the benefit for seasonal workers be discontinued.
New Jersey’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development indicated that unemployment is restricted for seasonal workers in 15 states, and the two mayors said several other shore towns agreed with their proposal.
One professor at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations, however, told the Ledger that the mayors are full of seaweed.
Prof. Jeff Keefe think it is a bad idea and maintained that towns take in much more money in summer tourism than they pay out for unemployment and that it’s worth the price of doing business.
Both Keefe and Cavalier said many of the workers are students, and the benefits the remaining few receive was negligible.
Schupp disagrees, however, and said it costs $1.2 million to run his town, which paid about $15,000 in unemployment claims this year. He believes that seasonal unemployment is too big a cost for his small town.
—JOE GREENE, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
