Pathways Back to Work Act

As we reported Friday, the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that December 2011 marked the first month with net jobs gained for women during the recovery, but their unemployment rate increased to 7.9 percent (up from 7.8 percent in November 2011 and 7.6 percent at the start of the recovery in June 2009). The data also show that the unemployment rate among teens has actually dropped 1.6 percentage points during the recovery – but it’s probably tough for teens to get very excited about their prospects when their December 2011 unemployment rate was still 23.1 percent, nearly three times higher than the overall unemployment rate (8.5 percent).

In other good-but-not-good-enough news for teens last week, President Obama announced a new initiative called Summer Jobs+, which aims to create 250,000 employment opportunities (including at least 100,000 paid positions) for low-income youth in the summer of 2012 through public-private partnerships. The urgent need for a response to the teen unemployment crisis is clear: teens lost nearly one million jobs during the recession and saw their unemployment rate rise from 16.3 percent in June 2007, the last summer before the recession, to 24.7 percent in June 2009. Overall unemployment among teens has declined only slightly in subsequent summers, and for young minority women, the recovery has been worse than the recession. Analysis by NWLC shows that black and Hispanic female teens are the only groups of teens who suffered larger increases in unemployment during the first two years of the recovery (June 2009-June 2011) than they did during the recession. Read more »

Congressional coverage this week has focused on the continuing debate in the super-committee and the just-passed spending bill that counts tomato paste on pizza as a vegetable in school lunches. It’s hardly a wonder that Congress’s recent approval ratings have been as low as 9 percent; more people approve of turning the U.S. into a communist country than approve of the job Congress is doing.

But there really are Members of Congress who are trying to do the right thing for the country – like helping the nearly 14 million women and men who are unemployed. Last week, I wrote about the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Extension Act, which would maintain vital federal unemployment benefits for workers who have been unemployed for more than six months. And this week, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced the Pathways Back to Work Act (S. 1861), a bill that would create employment and training opportunities for jobless workers, including those who have exhausted UI benefits or who have insufficient work experience or earnings to qualify for UI. (Rep. George Miller has introduced a similar bill, H.R. 3425, in the House.)

The $5 billion Pathways Back to Work Fund established by the bill includes: Read more »