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Congress Must Extend Unemployment Benefits ASAP |
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When Congress returns to work in September, one of its first items of business should be extending the federal unemployment benefits for the 640,000 jobless workers due to run out of benefits at the end of September and the 1.5 million more who will lose their jobless benefits by the end of the year.
In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director Bill Samuel said that July’s 0.1 percent drop in unemployment occurred only because some 450,000 gave up looking for work and dropped out of the workforce.
The July unemployment rate is still at a horrible 9.4 percent. A more accurate picture of the nation’s jobless crisis includes workers forced to take part-time jobs because they can’t find full-time work and discouraged workers who’ve given up finding a job. That figure is 16 percent.
The outlook for the jobless finding work is grim. Samuel noted that there are
fewer jobs in our economy than in 2000, even though the labor force has grown by 12 million since then, and six unemployed workers are now competing for every job opening. Most experts predict the ranks of the unemployed will continue rising over the coming months and throughout next year.
The number of long-term unemployed—those who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks—stands at 5 million. Samuel urged Congress to provide an additional 10 weeks of unemployment benefits to workers and all states and up to an additional 10 weeks for workers in states with unemployment at 11 percent or higher.
Fortunately, doing the right thing for jobless workers also happens to be good for the economy as a whole. Every dollar spent on unemployment benefits generates $2.11 in economic activity—the greatest impact of any stimulus proposal other than increasing food stamps. We urge Congress to take action immediately to keep workers from running out of benefits and to further stimulate the economy.
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How about creating benefits to discover and develop each person’s talents and gifts, instead of installing fear so that everyone gets desperate and finds any job. If we are to change anything, we must change ourselves first! Use sites like ResumeRace.com and let others in the same job sector to rate our resumes and cover letter. Call for a meeting on friends to talk about what each is good at, etc.