Senate Must Act to Extend Emergency Jobs Program
When Congress returns from its August recess, the Senate needs to act quickly to extend the TANF Emergency Fund, a program that has already created a quarter of a million jobs for unemployed parents and youth hardest hit by this savage recession.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports:
An emergency jobs program through which 37 states have provided subsidized jobs for nearly 250,000 otherwise unemployed parents and youth — helping families, businesses, and communities across America weather the recession — will end September 30 unless the Senate joins the House in voting to extend it.
The TANF Emergency Fund, which President Obama and Congress created in last year’s Recovery Act, has given states over $1 billion to operate subsidized jobs programs that have proved successful on multiple fronts. The fund has been a “win-win-win,” helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession. Without the fund, some 120,000 young people would not have had summer jobs and some 130,000 parents would not have had jobs to provide for their families’ basic needs; they would also have lost a valuable opportunity to build skills for the future. (Appendix A lists the number of job placements by state.)
As the Emergency Fund’s September 30 expiration looms, states are ramping down their subsidized jobs programs, stopping new placements and giving notice that existing jobs will end. (While some of the subsidized positions were summer youth jobs that were slated to end in late August, most were for unemployed parents.) For example, Illinois plans to send notices shortly after Labor Day to 26,000 workers participating in Put Illinois to Work to inform them that their jobs will end on September 30. In San Francisco, where all except a few hundred subsidies will end on September 30, letters have already gone out to employers and workers.
Some states — generally with smaller subsidized jobs initiatives — will continue making some job placements after September 30 using other funding, but these programs will be significantly smaller than if Congress were to extend the Emergency Fund for another year. (The House has already voted twice to extend the fund for one year, which would cost $2.5 billion.) In short, failure to extend the fund would eliminate tens of thousands of jobs and squander an opportunity to create many more jobs for parents who are desperately seeking work.
Christine Owens, Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project, said last week:
“The Emergency Fund has tremendously helped states create new employment opportunities. By reauthorizing it, even more states will have the opportunity to take advantage of millions in jobs subsidies. If Congress fails to reauthorize the Fund, those subsidies will vanish along with the job opportunities they provide. Continuing the TANF Emergency Fund is a concrete step Congress can take to create jobs, along with passage of larger-scale programs like the Local Jobs for America Act,” said Owens.
“Now is not the time to be adding to the ranks of unemployed, or cutting back on much-needed jobs,” concluded Owens. “It’s imperative that Congress reauthorize the Emergency Fund before it expires at the end of the month.”
The Coalition on Human Needs today reported that job-holders and employers who have benefited from the TANF Emergency Fund’s jobs program will be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, September 15 to deliver a letter to Congress from hundreds of businesses across the country. They will be joined by groups from Pennsylvania, California and Illinois, urging the Senate to pass an extension of the program through September 2011, a measure that the House has already passed.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year.
Tags: jobs, public jobs stimulus, TANF Emergency Fund, unemployment
