Congress Must Extend Unemployment Benefits ASAP
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.
