Just before adjourning for the Thanksgiving break, the Senate by a voice vote approved an extension of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits for jobless workers who exhaust their benefits before finding new work. This morning, President Bush signed the legislation.
Yesterday’s action by the Senate came the same day that the Department of Labor reported that new claims for unemployment benefits last week jumped to a 16-year high, hitting a seasonally adjusted 542,000 from a downwardly revised figure of 515,000 in the previous week.
More than 1 million U.S. workers have lost their jobs already this year, and more than 10 million are out of work and looking for new jobs.
The House passed the unemployment benefits extension bill in October. The bill provides seven additional weeks of unemployment insurance for workers who exhaust their benefits. It also adds 13 more weeks for workers in states with high jobless states, those with an average rate of 6 percent or more over three months.
Together with the 13 weeks of extended federal benefits enacted in June, this means unemployed workers will have access to up to 20 weeks of federal extended benefits in all states, and 33 weeks in high unemployment states.
The bill is far short of the economic stimulus Democrats said was needed to prevent a deeper recession. In October, the House passed two bills extending UI benefits. One was the stand-alone legislation approved today.
The other was an economic-recovery package that also included $37.8 billion to reduce the states’ share of Medicaid costs and $13.5 billion for building and repairing highways, bridges, airports and mass transit—creating 470,000 jobs in the process. There also was funding for more than $3.3 billion in loan guarantees for advanced battery manufacturing and a temporary increase in food stamp benefits.
But Senate Republicans, with Bush’s support, vowed to block the broader package of economic help. To ensure some relief for unemployed workers, House Democratic leaders took the stand-alone bill to the floor.
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Tags: UI, unemployment insurance, long-term jobless, unions, union, union blogs, labor
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