Some of the nation’s unemployed workers got relief as Congress headed home May 23—but not the 1.1 million long-term unemployed workers who already have exhausted unemployment benefits.

After ramming through tax cuts for the rich, Congress, on May 23, renewed the federal unemployment insurance (UI) benefits program set to expire May 31. President George W. Bush has indicated his support for the legislation.

Congressional renewal of the Temporary Extended Unemployment Compensation (TEUC) program is a halfway measure at best, say working family advocates. “While the new legislation now recognizes that unemployment is not going away, America’s workers deserve far better,” says Maurice Emsellem, policy director at the National Employment Law Project.

Renewing federal UI benefits for just 13 additional weeks for an estimated 2.1 million workers who will exhaust their regular unemployment benefits gives nothing to the roughly 1.1 million long-term unemployed workers who already have exhausted their state and federal UI benefits. Long-term unemployed workers are especially likely to have fallen into poverty and debt, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Although workers in six states deemed by TEUC to have “high unemployment” will qualify for up to 26 weeks of federal UI, workers in seven of the 10 states with the nation’s highest unemployment—California, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas—will receive only 13 additional weeks because of the way the law is written.

By the end of May 2003, 70 percent more workers had exhausted their federal benefits than during the recession of the early 1990s because today’s TEUC program is much less generous, according to the center. In addition, there are three job seekers for every available job, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Yet even as the economy has lost 3.1 million private-sector jobs since Bush took office, anti-worker Republicans, insisting they care about jobless workers, perpetuate the fiction that UI, which typically replaces less than 40 percent of income, makes workers lazy and available jobs go unfilled.      

“When you’re experiencing job weakness, it’s a time when you want to be temporarily generous,” says Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.). “But you do not want to create a program where people lean on unemployment. You want people to go out and get jobs.”

Republicans don’t have to fear unemployed workers have become too comfortable. A recent survey by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for NELP finds more than half of unemployed workers cut food spending, more than half had postponed medical or dental treatment and one-third had lost their health coverage since losing their jobs.

More

Read the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report on the effect of TEUC’s renewal on workers and the economy.

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