House Ways And Means Democrats Urge Social Security To Negotiate In Good Faith With Employee Union

     A press release from the House Ways and Means Committee:

Today, Ways & Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-MA), Social Security Subcommittee Chairman John B. Larson (D-CT), and Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Chairman Danny K. Davis (D-IL) sent a letter to Social Security Administration (SSA) Acting Commissioner Nancy A. Berryhill, highlighting their concerns with SSA’s failure to negotiate in good faith with the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 45,000 of the agency’s employees. In its contract negotiations, SSA is deliberately pursuing several anti-union policies that a U.S. District Court previously blocked. 

“SSA’s employees touch the lives of millions of Americans, ensuring that they are able to receive the benefits they have earned,” wrote Neal, Larson, and Davis. “Every day, they make sure that workers can afford to retire, that people with disabilities can live with dignity, and that widows and dependents are protected from destitution after losing a breadwinner’s income. Undermining SSA employees’ fundamental workplace rights and collective bargaining rights will immediately weaken the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission – delivering quality Social Security services to the public. We will not stand by while that happens.”

The members urged SSA to return to the bargaining table with AFGE and negotiate in good faith.

Full text of the letter is available HERE.

We Need More Immigration, Not Less

This appears to be expressed as a percentage of GDP

Youth Transition Pilot Shows Promise

     From the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

A program aimed at moving Arkansas youths from the disability rolls to employment is showing early signs of success, according to Brent Thomas Williams, an associate professor of counselor education at the University of Arkansas. ...

Williams is principal investigator for Arkansas Promise, a five-year, $36 million program focused on finding jobs and opportunities for Arkansas teenagers who receive Supplemental Security Income. ...

Richard Luecking of the Center for Transition and Career Innovation at the University of Maryland said early reports from all six projects are highly encouraging. ...

After 18 months, participants in all six pilot projects were more successful at finding work than members of a control group. In four cases, they also saw their earnings increase by a statistically significant amount, according to Mathematica Policy Research, a Princeton, N.J.-based organization that analyzed the data.

The Arkansas experiment, which wraps up this year, surpassed the others, however, in terms of youth employment and youth earnings. 

Roughly 2,000 Arkansas youths participated in the research project. Half received Arkansas Promise services; the others did not.

Participants received training, "intensive case management" and assistance finding jobs. An earned income exclusion allowed them to make money without jeopardizing their SSI payments.

Fifty-six percent of the participants in Arkansas Promise said they had held paying jobs, compared with 20 percent in the control group, officials said. Arkansas Promise participants reported earnings in the previous year of $1,960. The control group had earnings of $747. ...

     In general, I'm very pessimistic about programs to encourage disability benefits recipients returning to work. There's a long history of failure. However, I don't feel that way about youth transition programs. Young people have a far greater capacity to make adaptations that allow them to overcome obstacles than do older people. I've seen too many cases where young people with developmental disabilities leave high school without receiving any help in making the transition to employment. Predictably, they fail to hold down jobs. Give them a counselor to help point them in the right direction and help them find employment and then give them a job coach and many can make it.

My First Social Security Scammer Robocall

     I got my first Social Security scammer robocall yesterday. The message told me that my Social Security account had been "frozen" because of illegal activity on the account in Texas. Of course, I just hung up. Don't fall for this.

Congressional Hearings On Trustees Report?

     In past years there were Congressional hearings on the annual report of Social Security's Board of Trustees on the state of the Trust Funds on the same day the reports were issued or shortly thereafter. So far this year no hearings have been announced. Maybe it's because the report was issued the day after Easter while Congress in in recess. Maybe there just isn't the interest this year.

Benefit Statements Are Missed

     From Mark Miller writing for Reuters:

It is one of the most important retirement documents you will ever receive - but fewer Americans are reviewing their Social Security benefit statement nowadays due to cost-cutting and a government push to online services that is falling short.

Until about a decade ago, all workers eligible for Social Security received a paper statement in the mail that provided useful projections of their benefits at various ages, along with reminders on the availability of disability benefits and Medicare enrollment information.

But the Social Security Administration (SSA) decided in 2010 to save money by eliminating most mailings of benefit statements. Instead, we would all be encouraged to obtain this information online.

It is now abundantly clear that this is not working out.

The number of workers accessing their statements online has been just a fraction of those who once were reached by paper statements. And the cost-benefit tradeoff is poor.

Forty-two million Americans have created online accounts with the SSA since they were first offered seven years ago, the agency says, compared with the 155 million paper statements that were mailed in 2010, before the cost-cutting began. Meanwhile, the number of online account-holders who accessed their statements fell dramatically in fiscal 2018, from 96 percent to 43 percent, according to a report issued in February by the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). ...

Some Academic Support For The Grid Regulations

     From The Relationship Between Occupational Requirements and SSDI Activity by Matthew S. Rutledge, Alice Zulkarnain, and Sara Ellen King:

Evaluations of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications are based not just on poor health, but in most cases consider the vocational factors of age, education and work experience to determine whether individuals can work. These criteria indicate that SSDI applicants must not only be in poor health, but in poor health that actually conflicts with the requirements of their occupation (and other occupations). Yet little is known about the relationship between SSDI activity and the ability to meet occupational requirements. This study devises a Health Mismatch Index, which is the share of workers in an occupation citing health-related difficulties in the Survey of Income and Program Participation that would prevent them from performing at least one requirement marked as essential for their occupation in the Occupational Requirement Survey. 

The results show that the most common difficulties in required abilities that result in health mismatch are lifting 25 lbs., standing for one hour, or hearing well in a conversational setting. Furthermore, occupations with a high Index have lower earnings, are more exposed to hazardous environments, and place less emphasis on high performance and problem-solving. Jobs with higher rates of workers who experience at least one difficulty with a job requirement have a higher share of workers receiving SSDI benefits within a 16-month period. Although the share of the population receiving SSDI increased from 1997 to 2010, the Index fell from 7.4 to 6.1 percent, suggesting that the increase could have been higher if not for the decline in health mismatch.

     Note that it says the jobs with higher disability rates "place less emphasis on high performance and problem-solving." Another way of putting that would be "low skill" jobs. Why do people take low paying, low skill jobs? Because that's all they're suited to do. To give a dated reference, we don't live in Lake Woebegone. Not all the children are above average. Some are below average. Those are the ones who take the low paying, low skill jobs because that's all they're cut out to do. These jobs usually have higher physical demands that are more difficult for these workers to meet as they get older.

What's Going On At The Appeals Council With The Lucia Cases?

     I posted on April 8 about the first Appeals Council remand that I had heard of referring to Lucia v. SEC, the Supreme Court case that held that Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) who had not been appointed by an agency head were unconstitutionally appointed. That remand wasn't for a claimant represented by my firm. Since that time I've seen a redacted copy of the Appeals Council order in that case. It looked like a case that was going to be remanded anyway. I have heard of no other Lucia remands at Social Security. I have heard of no cases where the Appeals Council tried to rewrite an ALJ decision to somehow skirt Lucia. Also, I have seen no changes to the HALLEX manual that is used to disseminate new policies and procedures at the Appeals Council.

     After Social Security issued Social Security Ruling 19-1p on Lucia, I assumed that the agency knew what it wanted to do. I'm beginning to think that they still don't know what they want to do although that makes me wonder how the Ruling got issued. 

     More and more Social Security seems like an agency adrift with an Acting Commissioner who feels she lacks the authority to lead even on something like this where there's really only one course of action that's even doable -- remanding all the cases where a Lucia objection was made. There's not enough staff at the Appeals Council to rewrite all those decision, not to mention that doing so probably wouldn't pass muster in the federal courts. How is this a tough decision?