Having narrowly averted cutting off unemployment insurance to millions of Americans right before the holidays, Congress now returns to take up what should be a relatively simple task even for this Congress — a full reauthorization of federal unemployment insurance (UI), the payroll tax reduction and other provisions through 2012. But, as they did in December, some lawmakers are looking to revive House efforts to slash federal benefits, impose onerous new restrictions and move to dismantle the essential lifeline of unemployment insurance.
The stopgap two-month extension of the federal UI program will expire February 29th unless Congress acts on a full-year renewal. This week, the Joint Economic Committee issued a report on the benefits of continuing unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut. The report estimated that more than 3.3 million unemployed workers would be cut off of their UI benefits by June 2 without a renewal of the program (see page 4 for state-by-state estimates).
A 20-member Conference Committee of the House and Senate convened for the first time this week to begin work on a full year extension. The Committee is chaired by Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the lead sponsor of H.R. 3630, the House Republican bill that’s designed to drastically slash federal UI benefits while erecting harmful new barriers to benefits, making it harder for ordinary Americans to access their unemployment insurance.
The House H.R. 3630 proposals would:
* Slash federal UI by more than half in the highest unemployment states
* Allow mandatory drug testing of unemployment insurance claimants, stigmatizing jobless workers
* Make jobless workers pay for their reemployment services
* Deny benefits to those not fortunate enough to finish high school or GED
* Let states reduce benefits and divert unemployment benefit funds to other uses
The National Employment Law Project has published a detailed legislative analysis of these and other provisions being sought by House Republicans in H.R. 3630.
Public outcry, meanwhile, has been growing in support of a full renewal of unemployment insurance and against both the reckless cuts and the proposed new barriers to benefits. An Unemployedworkers.org action page has already generated a combined 96,000 email and fax messages to the members of the Congressional Conference Committee, and another 34,000 to Congressional leaders and other Members of Congress.
Tens of thousands of calls have been made to Congress through our dedicated toll-free line 888-245-3381.
House leaders had to, finally, accede to public pressure and drop their obstruction when Senate Republicans refused to take up the House version of H.R. 3630 back in December. Now, only strong public pressure will keep the Conference Committee from doing real damage to jobless workers, their families and the unemployment insurance system.
Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) gets it and is fighting for unemployed workers in the Conference Committee. Watch what Sen. Reed had to say about the unemployment extension issues during the Committee’s first meeting this week:
The US Conference of Mayors is meeting in Washington, and expressing their disgust with the ongoing spending cuts that leave their cities firmly mired in the ongoing economic crisis.
Only 26 of the nation’s 363 metropolitan areas had recovered their lost jobs by the end of 2011, and only 26 more are projected to recover them by end of this year, according to the report, which was commissioned by the United States Conference of Mayors. It will take at least five years for the 80 hardest-hit areas to recover the jobs they lost, the report forecast.
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Not only has Congress failed to overcome partisan gridlock to agree on a way to created much-needed jobs by spending more money on infrastructure, mayors said, but even the small sources of federal support that cities rely on — whether the Community Development Block Grants that were devised by Republican administrations in the 1970s or more recent federal programs that help struggling cities pay for more police officers or firefighters — are being scaled back as Washington has made cutting the deficit a priority.
Now, here’s a thought:
Mayor James Brainard of Carmel, Ind., a Republican, said that the country must get to a point where it spends less than it collects in revenues, but that it must be done over years, carefully.
“We have to recognize that it can’t be done in one year without throwing us into a huge, much worse depression than we’ve had,” he said. “It needs to be a multiyear plan that doesn’t create terrible hardship.”
The report commissioned by the mayors can be found here.
The opening lines of the introduction:
No one has been hit harder by the Great Recession than the 8.8 million Americans who have lost their jobs during the most significant economic downturn in generations.
Our nation’s mayors are focused on doing everything we can to help the jobless, the underemployed, and those worried about losing their jobs.
That kind of concern is a real contrast to all the unemployed bashing we’ve seen by members of Congress and the presidential candidates. Let’s hope that folks in Washington are paying attention while the mayors are in town.
The following is a statement from Working America.
The increase in jobs growth reported today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics—200,000 jobs gained as unemployment fell to 8.5 percent—is a modest improvement but one that remains virtually invisible to Working America’s 3 million members. Small improvements in jobs numbers are welcome news, but they are not enough.
Working America members are among the nearly 6 million people who have been jobless for more than six months. Employment in communities of color remains an ongoing catastrophe. And many workers have given up looking for work, leaving them uncounted in the statistics we read every month.
As corporations sit on huge piles of cash, they refuse to hire, devastating the economy. Not only are millions without work, there are 7.5 million homes that have entered into the foreclosure process, with 4.8 million more homes at risk.
Lawmakers should be calling for robust investment in infrastructure to rebuild crumbling roads, schools and bridges. They should be protecting homeowners and consumers from runaway banks and a financial system that favors the 1%. They should be holding accountable corporations who hoard their profits, rather than hire in the United States. Those would be the modest improvements to our economy worth celebrating.
The nation gained 200,000 jobs in December, and the unemployment rate improved to 8.5 percent from 8.6 percent in November, according to Department of Labor data out this morning. The unemployment rate has declined by 0.6 percentage points since August and the number of unemployed workers dropped to 13.1 million from close to 14 million.
The data also show the:
unemployment rate for adult men decreased to 8 percent in December. The jobless rates for adult women (7.9 percent), teenagers (23.1 percent), whites (7.5 percent), blacks (15.8 percent) and Hispanics (11 percent) showed little change. The jobless rate for Asians was 6.8 percent.
Most industries added jobs, with the exception of construction and government. In 2011, 280,000 jobs were cut in local government, state government, (excluding education) and the U.S. Postal Service.
In December, employment in transportation and warehousing rose (50,000) and manufacturing (23,000). Retail trade continued to add jobs in December, with a gain of 28,000. Health care added 23,000 jobs in December and mining employment rose by 7,000 over the month. Over the year, mining added 89,000 jobs.
The jobs report is a “step in the right direction,” according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which pointed out that data also show hours and wages were up, underemployment dropped and the duration of unemployment declined.
The organization cautioned, however that
The jobs deficit left from losses in 2008/2009 remains well over 10 million jobs; even at December’s growth rate, it would still take about seven more years — until around 2019 — to fill the gap and get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate. We need reports this strong and stronger for many years to come to bring our labor market back to health.
In October we told you about the governors and legislators proposing mandatory urine testing in order to qualify for food stamps or welfare.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about Rep. Jack Kingston from Georgia, who wants the unemployed to undergo mandatory drug testing to “qualify” for unemployment benefits.
The latest entrant into the drug testing wars is Michigan. From Huffington Post:
Officials in Michigan’s Department of Human Services want to bring back drug testing of welfare recipients, a controversial practice that Michigan courts struck down more than a decade ago. The new policy would differ from the one enacted under Republican Gov. John Engler in 1999, which required a urine test to apply for benefits and would have subjected recipients to random drug screenings.
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Michigan state Rep. Jeff Farrington (R-Utica) introduced a bill on Dec. 13 that would require applicants take a drug test to qualify for FIA benefits. Under the proposed bill, which is still up for discussion, recipients who passed a drug screening would have the cost of the test deducted from their first benefits payment.
Great. Not only do they want to demonize the poor, they want the poor to pay for that demonization. Rep. Farrington should heed the lesson of Governor Rick Scott of Florida, whose misguided urine test policies lead to record low approval levels. From Mother Jones:
But with 96 percent of applicants passing the test with flying colors (and another 2 percent getting inconclusive results), the state is having to buy back a lot of clean pee: 11.5 gallons at $34,300 every month, assuming an average sample size of 1.5 ounces and and average test price of $35.
That’s spending an awful lot of taxpayer money just to harass poor people. It’s certainly not creating the big savings that Governor Scott promised his constituents.
On the one hand, we hear a lot of gnashing of teeth from DC about job creation, yet on the other, we have the ongoing blame being heaped upon those who aren’t able to find work and are living in poverty, as if being unemployed or poor were somehow voluntary.
It is deeply distressing to see this becoming a national trend.
Update 3:55 p.m.: It looks like the House Republicans have bowed to overwhelming public pressure and agreed to the short-term extension.
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“Have we become so dysfunctional that even when we agree on things we can’t do it?” President Barack Obama asked today. It’s a good question.
We’re still not really close to an agreement on an extension of unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut that will expire in ten days. The easy answer is for the House to pass the short-term extension passed by an overwhelming bipartisan margin in the Senate—but the Tea Party radicals who keep Speaker John Boehner on a short leash are preventing that. The President is pushing hard to try and break the deadlock this week.
The consequences of failing to pass an extension? Millions of people cut off from the lifeline of unemployment insurance, and 160 million people facing a payroll tax hike. “”So many of these debates get reduced to which party is winning and which party is losing,” Obama said in a statement today, “but we should remind ourselves this is about the American people.”
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Obama said that more than 30,000 people have written in to explain what the end of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits would means to them. For working-class and middle-class families, those dollars represent heating oil, food, gas for your car to get you to and from work, or school supplies. For the economy as a whole, it’s fewer dollars that van flow to local businesses.
“This is exactly why people get so frustrated with Washington,” Obama said. He’s right. It’s time for Boehner to get it together and pass the Senate’s bipartisan compromise, and then get to work on an extension for the rest of 2012.
The following is a statement from Working America.
The recent move to block unemployment insurance, which is set to expire December 31st, will devastate millions of working families already struggling to get by in this Wall Street-created economic crisis.
As House Republicans take leave of their duties to the American people, and big banks and financiers enjoy their bailouts and record profits, jobless Americans will continue this holiday week and next to demand responsible governance from their lawmakers who claim to hold their interests at heart.
In places like New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and more, working families will gather together, make phone calls, and send messages to lawmakers pushing for immediate extension to unemployment insurance – an uncontroversial measure that keeps jobless people afloat in this scant job market and provides immediate economic stimulus to communities.
Fearing they didn’t have the votes to defeat a bipartisan Senate compromise that would extend unemployment insurance (UI) for long-term jobless workers and a payroll tax cut for workers, Republican House leaders scuttled a vote on the bill today. Then they left town for the holidays. Both the UI program and the tax cut expire Dec. 31.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) previously indicated he supported the compromise that passed the Senate 89-10 with 39 Republican votes. However, when the Republican tea party wing vociferously objected, he changed his tune and opposed the bill. Republican leaders then blocked an up or down vote and 229 Republicans voted to kill Senate bill through parliamentary trickery.
Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), says that the compromise was negotiated “with the involvement and blessing of the Speaker of the House.” She also says that Senate bill rebuffed attempts in an earlier House bill that scapegoated unemployed workers and “enacted dangerous changes to the basic UI program which undermined its very purpose and effectiveness.”
While a two-month deal is not ideal, time is running out to protect the unemployed from being victims of the worst partisan games Congress has ever seen. Congress is preparing to recess for five weeks. By the time members return to D.C. to begin negotiations anew, close to 1.8 million long-term unemployed will lose their only life-line. As Speaker Boehner well knows, this stalling tactic virtually guarantees that benefits for the long-term unemployed, those already hit hardest by the recession and slow recovery, will lapse for a dangerously long period of time.
Wondering why this Congress has an approval rating that has hit a historical-record low of 11 percent? Just check out the surreal means by which the mad Tea Party that runs the House Republican caucus halted unemployment insurance and middle-class tax cuts today.
In less than two weeks, the payroll tax holiday and extended unemployment benefits will both expire—a major hit to the economy next year. But the House, in this vote, showed themselves perfectly comfortable with that outcome.
As I go through the details of how this economic relief measure actually went down, let’s remember that this is not some abstract matter of legislative arcana, or a purely political battle. This is about the payroll taxes paid by 160 million working people and the unemployment insurance that millions of families of the jobless depend on. This may seem like a silly Washington story, but when you look at the actual lives and pocketbooks of working-class and middle-class people, it’s a devastating failure.
As I’ve said before, there should be an easy answer here: everyone in Congress should be able to agree to cleanly extend the payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance. The Senate tried and failed, thanks to Republican filibusters, to pass longer-term extensions of these provisions on their own and through the American Jobs Act. Finally, this weekend, they passed a bipartisan two-month extension that would give them time to continue to negotiate over the long-term options.
That was the theory, anyway, until the hard right of the House GOP caucus decided not to accept the bipartisan deal. Late last night, Speaker John Boehner planned to bring the Senate bill to the floor with the intent of defeating it—but was afraid he wouldn’t have the votes to kill it outright.
All that the House has to do to make the bill officially ready to be signed into law is hold a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate’s bipartisan bill. But during a 3 a.m. meeting of the House Rules Committee last night, the Republican majority devised a different plan — twist the voting procedure so that the Senate’s bill can be rejected while allowing the Republicans to save face by technically voting “aye.”
And the plan succeeded. In a 229-193 vote, the House Republicans killed the bipartisan Senate bill, in a downright acrobatic feat of legislative farce:
They didn’t give that bill an up-or-down vote. They gave it a down-or-down vote. The question before the House wasn’t “do you agree with the Senate bill?” It was “do you disagree with the Senate bill?” Thus a “yes” vote was actually a vote against extending the payroll tax cut and vice-versa; and even if the majority of the House had supported the Senate bill, it wouldn’t have passed. It was set up to fail.
So what happens now? The Senate is out of session, which means the House is kicking the issue back to an empty chamber. The House Republicans are insisting on the passage of their own bill, which would have cut 3.3 million people off of unemployment benefits, among other bad provisions.
There are 11 days to go, and Christmas hits at the end of this week. People who are depending on the economic boost of the payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance—like Working America’s 3 million members, half a million of whom are unemployed—can’t wait around for the House Republicans to grow up. Is it any wonder that 9 out of 10 Americans aren’t happy with their representatives?
