Congress, White House, Set to Ignore Long-Term Jobless—Again?

by Mike Hall, Jun 9, 2008

What will it take to get Congress to wake up and act to extend unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to the millions of jobless workers who are running out of benefits before finding a new job?

Will it take a soaring unemployment rate? Got that. On Friday the nation’s jobless rate made its biggest one-month jump in more than 20 years.

Maybe it’ll take a pattern of disappearing jobs? Check. In May, for the fifth month in a row, the economy shed jobs—nearly 50,000 and more than 200,000 this year. Not only are there fewer and fewer jobs, there are more people—both the jobless and new entrants into the job market looking for work.

Or maybe lawmakers will be spurred into action when there’s a record number of jobless workers who can’t find work before receiving their last unemployment check. Well, we’ve got that too: More than 200,000 workers run out of benefits every month and today, more than 1.5 million workers have exhausted their UI benefits and remain jobless. Some 3.5 million unemployed workers this year will cash their last check and still be out of work.

Late last month, it looked like the nation’s long-term unemployment crisis finally had registered in Washington. Both the House and the Senate passed legislation that would provide an additional 13 weeks of UI benefits for jobless workers in every state and an additional 13 weeks to those in states with high unemployment rates (more than 6 percent). The UI extension was part of a supplemental spending bill for the war in Iraq.

But President Bush says he will veto the war spending bill if Congress includes help for the unemployed—just like he threatened to veto the economic stimulus bill this year if it included a UI extension. He and most Republican congressional leaders claim unemployment is just not high enough to justify an extension. What world do they live in? Oh right, a taxpayer-funded world that includes free health care, free gym access and a comfy salary far out of range of most working Americans.

Get this, the Bush White House says extending unemployment benefits would mean workers would just end up lollygagging about, watching TV and not looking for work. Really, this is what the May 20 Bush administration’s veto threat—also called a Statement of Administration Policy—said.

Increasing and extending unemployment insurance benefits when unemployment is this low would be unprecedented and counterproductive because it would reduce the incentive for workers to find new employment.

Today—even with Friday’s stunning jump in unemployment—there are strong indications Congress will strip the UI extension from the supplemental war funding bill.Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, puts it this way:

It would show a new level of callousness for Congress to wait any longer to pass and the president to sign an extension of unemployment benefits.

Congress needs to stand up to Bush and say: “Go ahead. You tell the millions of workers—and the millions more of their family members—who can’t find a job in your economy, who are paying $4 a gallon for gasoline, who are losing their health care coverage, and maybe their homes, you tell them: ‘Tough luck. Things just aren’t bad enough yet. Maybe later—after I’m back on the ranch.’”

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