Prolonged Aid to Unemployed Is Running Out

[Joanne98]

Over the coming months, as many as 1.5 million jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits, ending what for some has been a last bulwark against foreclosures and destitution.

Because of emergency extensions already enacted by Congress, laid-off workers in nearly half the states can collect benefits for up to 79 weeks, the longest period since the unemployment insurance program was created in the 1930s. But unemployment in this recession has proved to be especially tenacious, and a wave of job-seekers is using up even this prolonged aid.

Tens of thousands of workers have already used up their benefits, and the numbers are expected to soar in the months to come, reaching half a million by the end of September and 1.5 million by the end of the year, according to new projections by the National Employment Law Project, a private research group.

Unemployment insurance is now a lifeline for nine million Americans, with payments averaging just over $300 per week, varying by state and work history. While many recipients find new jobs before exhausting their benefits, large numbers in the current recession have been unable to find work for a year or more.

Calls are rising for Congress to pass yet another extension this fall, possibly adding 13 more weeks of coverage in states with especially high unemployment. As of June, the national unemployment rate was 9.5 percent, reaching 15.2 percent in Michigan. Even if the recession begins to ease, economists say, jobs will remain scarce for some time to come.

"If more help is not on the way, by September a huge wave of workers will start running out of their critical extended benefits, and many will have nothing left to get by on even as work keeps getting harder to find," said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director of the employment law project.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/02-1

[glowing]

1. This is when it makes sense for Govt. to just start hiring people on a massive scale

to do some of the things that need to be done... Our infrastructure is crumbling, our schools could use more people/ professionals to help teach children, our systems need updating.. taking old programs and software and tranferring it to a modern world. Obama wants to transfer medical records to electronic records.. someone needs to help do that... All these items won't come from the private sector. But govt could. We need to think beyond private sector providing jobs. Its not going to happen until they feel they need to rev up.. AND people are still in a cut back mode. Many have learned cut back for a while now.

Just in our family: There are limited unecessary driving trips to anywhere. We buy what we need. If we clothes shop, its only when its the end of a season sale.. the other day I got a pair of $50.00 jeans for 3.95 at JC penny.. and a few other types of deals like that. AND when we go to the store, its a list.. nothing outside of that list unless their was a sale item and it covers the "want" item. AND we are no worse for it. This has become a learned habit over the last few years. Its not going to suddenly change just because I many eventually have a couple of spare bucks... AND that's the thing, we need to change our society so that we aren't just massively consuming, yet being able to be productive in a manner that works and still provides for things like payments for the mortgage or apt rent... Transition into quality over quantity. Transition into people over bottom line. Transition from outsourcing to create slavery abroad into making sure that worldwide all human beings enjoy personal freedoms.

[mother earth]

2. Real health care reform, throw out the insurance companies &

actually provide health care...there are the jobs & there would go the waste and disaster of health care as we presently know it. There's no need for voodoo magic, once you clean up the corrupt entities...but not while we enable the bums to ration death care, and corporations to dictate to this country.

And if no jobs are forthcoming, we haven't seen anything yet, unemployment benefits is the band-aid holding everything together. Wanna see commerce stop and worst fear make it's stranglehold?

[Coyote_Bandit]

3. And then there are the even longer term unemployed

who never benefitted from that extended aid......

Funny how nobody ever mentions them.