Main Street

Battles Loom on Unemployment Insurance

Yesterday’s report of rising initial unemployment claims marked the fourth such increase in the last five weeks, and as Laura posted here, the 500,000 initial claims last week were the most since November 2009.

In the context of utterly stagnant private sector job growth, these reports scream for major stimulative action, including major new jobs programs from the administration and Congress as well as a massive Federal Reserve response to boost the economy.

What these reports also highlight is the need to strengthen the unemployment insurance programs already in place and extend them to the many newly unemployed workers, even as measures are pursued to address the crisis facing the already long-term unemployed.

The most recent extension of the federal unemployment benefit programs, which finally passed after a two-month battle to overcome Republican-led obstruction in the Senate, provides eligibility to those programs through the end of November for those who exhaust the 26-weeks of regular state benefits before that date.

In most cases this means that those workers who become unemployed after June 1, 2010 currently will not be eligible for the extended federal programs. That’s already a lot of newly unemployed workers. Since the first week of June, more than 4,600,000 initial claims have been reported.

Some of these recent initial claims are, no doubt, from unemployed workers who are filing anew following the end of temporary jobs, and are returning to the unemployment benefit systems in their states. It is not known what percentage of initial claims are re-entrants to the programs. But it is estimated that a much higher proportion are actually newly unemployed workers.

Congress will need to address extending long-term jobless benefits yet again when it returns from the August recess.

The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year

Tags: jobless benefit extension, Jobs, unemployment