Dubious Kansas endorsements unravel truthfulness of attack on federal unemployment benefits
The letter sent Wednesday to Gov. Laura Kelly had all the trappings of a legitimate appeal from the business community.
Compiled by the state Chamber of Commerce and bearing the names of 181 diverse businesses, business associations, nonprofit groups and government agencies, it called for an end to enhanced federal unemployment benefits for Kansas workers.
But the truthfulness of the campaign unraveled Thursday as multiple executives whose organizations were listed as supporters said they didn’t know anything about the letter and wouldn’t have signed it if they did.
No one knows how many organizations actually supported the campaign to take away the enhanced benefits, but one thing is certain: It was not 181.
In some cases, low-level employees signed an e-mail petition without realizing they were committing their company to the cause. In others, it’s unclear just how they got on the list.
For example, the city government of Fort Scott, 88 miles south of Kansas City, doesn’t know how it wound up on the list and it didn’t intend to, said Allyson Turvey, the city’s community development manager.
“I certainly can’t speak for everyone that works for the city, but that does not sound like something that the city would have signed,” Turvey said.
Fort Scott employs more than 100 people and there would be no easy way to determine if one of them had signed on as a supporter, she said.
Chad Lawhorn, editor and publisher of the Lawrence Journal-World, posted on Facebook bluntly objecting to the paper’s inclusion.
“We have a staff of journalists who are working very hard to provide basic and needed information to this community to help everyone in their efforts to make it a better place,” Lawhorn wrote. “We put up with a lot of crap as part of the process, and now the latest piece of crap that we are dealing with appears to be someone trying to inappropriately use our name for political purposes.”
E-mail blitz to Kansas companies, organizations
Many of the names on the letter to Kelly appear to have come through a blast e-mail sent out last week by Natalie Bright, a lobbyist for the Kansas Society for Human Resource Management, a trade group for HR professionals.
The e-mail said Kansas SHRM “has joined over a dozen Kansas business associations and numerous employers in a coalition to petition Governor Kelly to end Kansas’ participation in the additional UI federal benefits and instead promote return-to-work initiatives and incentivize Kansans to re-enter the workforce.”
It asked companies and organizations to “join KSSHRM in our efforts by adding your company name to the quickly-growing number of supporters,” followed by a blue button saying “Sign the Letter to Gov. Kelly.”
Clicking on the button generates a return e-mail to Bright’s address.
It was unclear who in any business or organization would have actually received the e-mail.
“The people that got this e-mail maybe didn’t realize what they were signing up for, didn’t realize that it was going to be part of a whole political statement and they weren’t authorized to sign on to it,” said Rep. Jason Probst, D-Hutchinson. “Or they thought that they were signing like a personal thing. It does say in the e-mail we invite your company to join, but it’s really like one of those Facebook petitions people get e-mails about all the time.”
That’s what happened at GraceMed, a United Methodist Church-affiliated clinic serving low-income people in the Wichita, Topeka and McPherson areas.
“As the CEO, I have not signed anything,” said Venus Lee, adding that it’s the kind of issue the clinic would not take a stand on anyway.
Human Resources Director Trisha McPherson later confirmed that multiple GraceMed employees signed the Kansas SHRM petition.
She said they didn’t understand that their signatures would be represented as an endorsement by the clinic.
“We have been able to determine that there were some individuals that signed, but again, not at any type of official capacity — just more on a personal level,” McPherson said.
That same scenario played out at the Auburn Washburn school district in Topeka. There, the school superintendent and board president sent a letter to the governor clarifying they had nothing to do with the letter and that they’ve asked the people who sent it to remove their district from the list of supporters.
“It has been brought to our attention that a non-administrative employee sent an email response to a blanket email from the Kansas State Council of SHRM that said, ‘Yes, I support the ending of additional UI federal benefits,’” said a statement issued by the district. “The employee was clearly not speaking on behalf of the district and had no intention of doing so.”
Bright didn’t respond to a phone message Thursday. Kansas SHRM didn’t answer an email sent to a general account for the organization.
The letter comes amid boiling arguments on social media and elsewhere between those who contend that government benefits encourage laziness and those who argue that profitable companies wouldn’t have problems hiring if they paid decent wages.
Sherriene Jones-Sontag, the Kansas Chamber’s vice president of communications, defended the letter and its methodology in an e-mail.
She said the endorsement list for ending the federal benefits was compiled by the Chamber from names gathered largely by the state affiliates of SHRM and the National Federation of Independent Business.
“Any insinuation the business organizations who are helping their members find workers played fast and loose with our communications to members is wrong and insulting,” she said. “Further, the characterization that employers are ‘rich trying to get richer’ and that we are ‘punching down on the poor’ is so disingenuous and clearly not the true reflection of how Kansans work together to find solutions to the problems our state faces.”
She theorized that some supporters have withdrawn because of the political pushback the letter received. She said the group had received some requests from organizations to have their names removed and requests to join. An amended letter will be released Friday.
“We welcome the opportunity to remove those employers who either have had second thoughts about letting the governor know about their struggle to find workers after being the victim of political intimidation or had internal communications issues,” she said.
NFIB did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Probst started checking into the veracity of the list Wednesday night when he was contacted by the Hutchinson Public Library, where officials were surprised to find their agency named as opponents of enhanced unemployment benefits.
“This came out of sort of the blue,” said Library Director Gregg Wamsley. “This is the kind of political endorsement or issue that our library would never take a stance on. If we ever take a stance on a political issue, it’s one that directly affects libraries and this would not be it.”
Get back to work
Federally enhanced unemployment benefits, born last year as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have become an issue as health restrictions are lifted and businesses that laid off their employees seek to restaff.
Multiple businesses have complained that the federal benefit, $300 a week until Sept. 6, has discouraged Kansans from returning to their jobs because the combination of state and federal benefit payments give them enough to live on, in some cases more than they were making when they worked.
Several states, including Missouri, have started refusing the federal benefits in a bid to force COVID-displaced workers to re-enter the job market.
Despite the Chamber letter’s dubious origins, Republican leaders seized on it as a rally point for opposition to Kelly and Sharice Davids, Kansas’ lone congressional Democrat.
Kansas House Republican leadership embraced the letter in a statement saying “Governor Kelly continues to hold Kansas back . . . We join with Kansas employers in calling on Governor Kelly to end this counter productive program and help get Kansans back to work.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee cited the letter in an anti-Davids e-mail concluding that her “socialist agenda isn’t putting people back on the job, it’s destroying Kansas businesses and the economy.”
But several of the letter’s most committed supporters aren’t actually hiring.
The only job ad on the Kansas Chamber website is an out-of-date listing seeking interns for the legislative session that just ended.
Kansas Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, signed and supports the letter to Kelly, said its executive director, Dave Trabert.
But KPI “does not currently have any career openings,” according to its website.
Unwilling participants in the letter reported varying degrees of hiring success.
McPherson said GraceMed’s “got lots of openings” and is “most certainly” struggling to fill them.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Hutchinson library has added two new staffers in the past three weeks, is interviewing for additional positions, and has had no shortage of applicants for its openings, Wamsley said.
“Another thing frustrating about the letter is it’s implying that we’re having difficulty finding people to work for us and that has not been our lived experience,” Wamsley said.
Contributing: Bryan Lowry of the Kansas City Star
This story was originally published May 20, 2021 at 4:46 PM.
