URBAN INSTITUTE
UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE FOR TOMORROW'S ECONOMY
March 6, 2012
Hal Bergan is a consultant and a former administrator of the Wisconsin Unemployment
Insurance Division. He headed up the State Information Data Exchange System consortium, a
group of states that came together to develop a new national system for sharing information
between unemployment insurance agencies and employers. Previously, Bergan was a private
consultant specializing in process improvement. His public-sector work included acting as policy
director for three Wisconsin governors.
Matt Harvill is the vice president for unemployment compensation at Kelly Services Inc., where
he has been for 25 years in a variety of positions, including methods analyst, branch supervisor,
account representative, and unemployment compensation manager. He has served on the board
of directors of UWC, Strategic Services for Unemployment and Workers’ Compensation since
1995; he is currently the organization’s chair.
Pamela Loprest (moderator) is a labor economist and the director of the Urban Institute’s
Income and Benefits Policy Center and director of its Unemployment and Recovery project. Her
work examines how to structure programs and policies to better support work among lowincome families, especially those with work-related challenges. She is conducting research on
families that are disconnected from work and welfare and the impacts of unemployment on
individuals and families. Loprest is the coauthor of Leaving Welfare: Employment and WellBeing of Families That Left Welfare in the Post-Entitlement Era.
Rick McHugh is a senior staff attorney and Midwest coordinator at the National Employment
Law Project (NELP), where he has worked with advocates in the Midwest and other states to
improve state unemployment insurance programs. In 2005, he established the Economic
Dislocation Initiative, to serve Midwest states suffering from major layoffs in the auto industry.
Before joining NELP, he was a legal services attorney representing low-income workers seeking
to access their government benefits. As a lawyer for the United Auto Workers, he represented
laid-off workers wanting to access unemployment benefits and Trade Adjustment Assistance.
Wayne Vroman is a senior fellow in the Urban Institute’s Center on Labor, Human Services,
and Population, where he helped create models to examine unemployment insurance trust fund
solvency in fifteen states. He has authored five books on unemployment insurance, including
Employment Termination Benefits in the U.S. Economy, The Funding Crisis in State
Unemployment Insurance, and Topics in Unemployment Insurance Financing. More recently, he
has worked on unemployment insurance programs in Kentucky, Maine, and Ohio, and on two
U.S. Department of Labor projects assessing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.