Main Street

Take Action: Unemployment Aid Must Be Reauthorized

There’s been a lot of bad news on unemployment over the past year. I doubt I need to tell you how much. But since it’s not being treated like the emergency it is, it bears repeating. Unemployment over 10%. Unemployment plus underemployment—people working part-time who want to be working full-time, people who’ve stopped looking for work because they got discouraged—at 17.5%. Long-term unemployment has been a particularly bad problem:

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.

Unemployment benefits extensions have helped many jobless workers continue to get by in this difficult time.

But once again, we’re facing another emergency piled on top of the broader jobs crisis. The National Employment Law Project explains:

Despite the crucial 14-20 weeks of extensions Congress passed earlier this month, the looming question is what happens next year, if the entire ARRA unemployment package expires with nothing in its place. NELP’s projection of 1.1 million workers losing access to jobless benefits is a combined estimate of exhaustions from state-provided benefits and federally-funded extensions. In January:

• Almost 450,000 workers will exhaust their 26 weeks of states benefits. Because ARRA expires, they will not be able to access the next stages of unemployment assistance – the temporary EUC extension program or the permanent federal program of Extended Benefits.
• Nearly 600,000 workers who have already moved from state to federal benefits will not be eligible to continue receiving EUC past their current tier of benefits. EUC has four tiers of benefits but workers will not be able to progress to the next tier once their current one runs out in January1.
• Between January and March, the number without federal jobless benefits is expected to swell to nearly three million workers if the ARRA is not reauthorized.

In addition to losing jobless benefits, workers will no longer qualify for the COBRA subsidy program when it expires in December, or receive the extra $25 /week in jobless benefits provided under the ARRA.

To avert this disaster, Congress must reauthorize the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s unemployment insurance programs. Take action here.

Tags: unemployment