Unemployment Benefits Running Out if Action Isn’t Taken

You think things are bad now, with nine million people collecting unemployment benefits? Just wait until September, when half a million of them stop getting unemployment, whether or not they have jobs. Or the end of the year, when that half a million will have grown to 1.5 million, according to the National Employment Law Project.

Workers are currently eligible for 20 to 53 weeks of unemployment benefits, and time is starting to run out for many. It already has for Pamela Lampley.

For many desperate job seekers, any extension will seem a blessing. Pamela C. Lampley of Dillon, S.C., said she sat outside the post office last month and cried because “it was the first Wednesday in quite some time that I’ve gone to the mailbox and left without an unemployment check.” The jobless rate in her state is 12.1 percent.

Ms. Lampley, 40, who is married with three children, lost her job as a human resources officer in January 2008 and had been receiving $351 a week, which covered the groceries and gas. Even so, she and her husband, who still has work as a machinist, were sinking into debt. Now, still poorer, she feels devastated because they cannot buy their son a laptop to take to college and she cannot give her 9-year-old son money for the movies.

Remember, South Carolina refused to make changes to its unemployment law that would have entitled the state to federal stimulus money to extend and expand benefits. Ms. Lampley might still be receiving a check if Mark Sanford and the South Carolina legislature hadn’t rejected that money. (This was back before Mark Sanford went hiking on the Appalachian Trail and looked like a strong 2012 presidential candidate—the kind of potential candidate who’d make hay on rejecting money that would go directly to helping struggling families in his state.)

Luckily, there’s something that can be done to hold back the suffering to be caused by half a million, then a million, then 1.5 million people losing that precious $300 or so each week that’s holding them out of the most desperate poverty.

Specifically, NELP is urging Congress and the Obama administration to provide a minimum of 10 weeks of additional benefits to long-term unemployed workers in all states, with progressively more weeks of benefits for states where unemployment is higher, including up to 20 weeks of additional benefits for workers in states with unemployment rates surpassing 11 percent.

This weekend, reacting to NELP’s recent projections reported in Sunday’s New York Times, Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Republican Senator Jim DeMint agreed on Fox News Sunday that Congress should extend benefits. After Rangel called extending benefits “right” and “moral,” DeMint agreed that Democrats and Republicans “need to take care of those who are unemployed” and that “we’ll definitely support that.”

Meanwhile, on CBS’s Face the Nation, National Economic Council Director Larry Summers said that the administration plans to “work with Congress to make sure that the unemployment insurance benefits that are necessary for the American people are maintained.” Christina Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisors, said on CNN’s State of the Union that an expansion of federal jobless benefits is “absolutely on the table.”

If you’re one of the people facing the end of your unemployment benefits, the Unemployment Lifeline can’t extend them, but it can help you find resources in your area to get through the tough times ahead.