Deborah WeinsteinExecutive Director, Coalition on Human Needs
Posted: April 5, 2010 09:09 AM
Today -- April 5 -- is not a good day for people who've been out of work more than six months. That is because the U.S. Senate failed to extend the federal program of Unemployment Insurance benefits before leaving for a two-week Congressional recess, even though the program was scheduled to expire on April 5 -- a week before they return.
So here it is, April 5. In the next week, more than 212,000 jobless people will lose unemployment benefits because the Senate failed to act, according to an analysis by the National Employment Law Project. The Senate leadership, which tried to take up the extension, has said they will make the benefits retroactive when the Senate finally acts. That is undeniably a good thing, but in the week or two people will be without their $300 - $400 weekly benefit checks, it's likely that some will run out of food. Some, once denied benefits, will not understand that they are only temporarily ineligible, and may not come back to seek assistance after Congress acts.
The latest unemployment figures are a painful reminder of why the federal benefits are so badly needed, and why letting the program expire is simply shameful. The federal program picks up where state benefits leave off, covering people who remain out of work after their state benefits run out (usually after 26 weeks). The number of long-term unemployed has been growing month after month, and grew by a stunning 414,000 in March. There are now 6.5 million people jobless for more than six months; their proportion of all the unemployed has now grown to 44.1 percent. The jobs picture showed some signs of improvement in March, but it will be years before we get back to where we were before the recession. If we abandon the jobless now, their loss of income will put the brakes on the economy just when we need to accelerate. And it is a pretty nasty thing to do, besides.
Providing unemployment benefits is not by a long shot all we should be doing. We need to do far more to help the long-term unemployed find work. Congress has been too slow and too timid to invest productively to create jobs and provide training. Now is the perfect time to give people the chance to get jobs repairing schools and roads, and to enter the fields of renewable energy and health care. Representative George Miller has recently introduced the Local Jobs for America Act (H.R. 4812) to put people to work rebuilding communities and to save existing local jobs. Such an approach would allow people to improve their skills and experience while meeting community needs. Their work will strengthen the economic recovery. The bill would do a lot - creating or saving one million jobs - and therefore it is not cheap ($100 billion over 2 years). It is just the kind of investment we need to jumpstart the economy. But it will be opposed by some in Congress because of the deficit - the same wrong-headed rationale that has temporarily stymied unemployment benefits.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deborah-weinstein/the-senate-lets-unemploym_b_525147.html