Unemployment & UI

Neither the approaching holidays nor data showing a bleak jobs picture seems to have mellowed House Republican leaders. The payroll tax-unemployment insurance-“doc fix” bill (H.R. 3630), introduced by Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), which the House is expected to vote on today, has already drawn a veto threat from President Obama because of a provision on the Keystone oil pipeline. But there are many other reasons to be deeply concerned about this bill. Read more »

The White House just issued a statement declaring President Obama’s intention to veto H.R. 3630. It’s short and to the point and posted in full below; if you want more details about the flaws in the bill, you can read our posts about it.

STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY

H.R. 3630 – Middle Class Tax Cut Act of 2011 (Rep. Camp, R-Michigan, and 5 others)

The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 3630. With only days left before taxes go up for 160 million hardworking Americans, H.R. 3630 plays politics at the expense of middle-class families. H.R. 3630 breaks the bipartisan agreement on spending cuts that was reached just a few months ago and would inevitably lead to pressure to cut investments in areas like education and clean energy. Furthermore, H.R. 3630 seeks to put the burden of paying for the bill on working families, while giving a free pass to the wealthiest and to big corporations by protecting their loopholes and subsidies.

Read more »

The “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act” (H.R. 3630), introduced by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp (R. Mich.), contains a very Scrooge-like pay-for to extend unemployment insurance benefits, payroll tax cuts, and doctors’ Medicare reimbursements: taking tax benefits away from low-income working families. H.R. 3630 would impose a new requirement for tax filers claiming the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit. As suggested by its name, this credit is intended to help families meet the costs of raising children. The credit is refundable for low-income families with at least $3,000 in earnings.

Specifically, H.R. 3630 would prevent tax filers from claiming the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit without a Social Security Number. This means that the brunt of the cuts to this important tax benefit would fall upon immigrant families. Read more »

For weeks now, we have been asking Congress to pass a bill to fully extend federal unemployment insurance (UI) benefits before they expire at the end of the year. Instead, last Friday, Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) introduced a bill (H.R. 3630) that would drastically reduce the number of weeks of federal UI available and would hit hardest in states with the highest unemployment (Michigan, ironically, being one of them). The bill also includes several other troubling proposals, including some changes to the overall structure of the UI program – but more on those in other posts.

The unemployment rate is currently at 8.6 percent, long-term unemployment is at record levels, and the jobs outlook is very grim (remember when some Senators voted to block several jobs bills rather than raise taxes on millionaires by even one cent?). It is shocking, then, that Rep. Camp not only proposes to cut critical federal UI benefits at all, but proposes to cut them by more than half: Read more »

If you’ve been following our coverage of how the continuing unemployment crisis is affecting women and their families, you’re probably well aware of the critical need to maintain federal unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. But even if you’ve never read this blog before today, you probably know that unemployment has been far too high for far too long. And I’m guessing someone you know well – a friend, a sibling, an aunt, a neighbor, or maybe you – has lost a job in recent years and depended on state and/or federal UI benefits to stay afloat.  

So it might have sounded like good news when Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, introduced the “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act” (H.R. 3630) and promised to “get[] Americans back to work through commonsense reforms” to UI and other programs. But don’t be fooled by the title – among many other misguided and downright awful provisions, the bill would severely undermine the effectiveness of UI by cutting federal benefits in the states hardest hit by the recession and attacking the very nature of the UI program as social insurance. 

Specifically, H.R. 3630 would dismantle the longstanding structure of the federal-state UI program by:

• Imposing unnecessary restrictions on UI eligibility and increasing state administrative costs. State laws already require UI recipients to actively seek new employment. But H.R. 3630 would require them to develop and implement costly new systems to closely track job seeking activities, imposing an unfunded and unnecessary administrative burden on state agencies. This new requirement appears to stem directly from the oft-repeated but ill-informed notion that jobless workers are lazy and don’t want to work. This noxious stereotype also seems to motivate the bill’s inclusion of another offensive (and costly) provision encouraging states to require UI applicants to submit to drug tests before they can receive benefits.

Another Friday is here, and we’re getting closer still to the end of the year. This week I’ve got stories on H&M’s new models, a controversial ad meant to curb teen drinking, a new documentary, and how mall Santas are managing expectations during tough times, all after the jump. Read more »

The deadline to extend federal unemployment benefits (UI) is rapidly approaching, but it is still not clear when Congress will get around to addressing this extremely critical issue. Meanwhile, some Members of Congress have indicated that they would vote against a bill to extend UI unless it changes the funding structure to let states use more money on non-benefit spending , meaning that money that should be dedicated to paying benefits can be used for paying back deficits, cutting employer taxes, and for other purposes.

That’s bad enough, but the justification offered for seeking this change in the UI funding structure is even more frustrating: The current structure, in the words of Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), “[is] discouraging people who can go back to work from going to work … [T]he program needs to be reformed to encourage people to get off it instead of encouraging them to stay on it.” It doesn’t take much to get what Senator DeMint is implying – that UI recipients are lazy, unmotivated, and would rather depend on government benefits for as long as possible than go back to work. As Senator Franken (D-MN) put it at today’s Senate hearing on long-term unemployment, this characterization is “offensive.”

Recent research has shown that claims that unemployment benefits discourage recipients from seeking jobs are exaggerated and that UI recipients are more proactive than non-recipients in looking for work. If that isn’t enough to debunk claims like Senator DeMint’s, the testimony at today’s hearing of Donna Stebbins, a long-term unemployed worker from Phoenix, really puts the lie to the notion that recipients of unemployment benefits are unmotivated:

Donna began her working life at age fourteen, when she began working summer jobs to earn spending money. Since that time, she and her husband Rick have done everything right. They paid their mortgage, put money away for retirement in a 401(k), and provided for their daughters. In April 2010 Donna was laid off and has been unable to find work. Read more »

Right now, Congress is up against a critical deadline to extend unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. If they fail to do so, 6 million people could lose their UI benefits in 2012, with nearly 2 million people losing them in January alone.

A failure to extend the program that provides these benefits would be devastating for women and their families. To bring attention the need for Congress to act swiftly, the HERvotes coalition has organized a blog carnival. Today, HERvotes coalition members will be blogging about the importance of UI benefits for women and need for Congress to extend UI benefits. We have links to some blog posts listed below the jump to get you started reading, and be sure to check out the full list of posts here.

Please also take a moment to urge your members of Congress to extend unemployment benefits before they expire. Read more »

$297.00

That was the size of my weekly unemployment insurance benefit from the District of Columbia. Two hundred ninety-seven dollars and zero cents. I signed up to start receiving UI benefits shortly after being laid off on Monday, November 15, 2010, appx. 10:30am.

On that fateful Monday morning, I became a statistic: Since the recession officially ended in June 2009, even as the economy added over 1.2 million jobs, women have lost 46,000 jobs. These days, 46.2 percent of women have been unemployed long enough to reach the mark of “long-term unemployment,” which is being jobless for 27 or more weeks.

Every week for nearly four months, I logged in online to my benefits claim system to declare that, yes, I was still unemployed; no, I had not worked this week; yes, I was still looking for work. Every week I’d receive $297.00, deposited directly into my checking account. And every week, I’d watch as the total fund allotted to me as an unemployed person dropped, fearing what would happen if I reached the day that balance hit $0.00. For every day of my unemployment, this was my lifeline – and I was watching it run out before my eyes. This benefit afforded me $1,188.00 each month, but $1,100.00 of that went directly to my rent. Trying to pay for your food, gas and electric bills, and metro fare on $88.00 a month isn’t easy. It’s practically impossible. Read more »

Today’s jobs data seemed to have some good news – overall unemployment dropped to 8.6 percent, a level of unemployment we haven’t seen since before the start of the recovery.  However, our analysis shows some troubling trends. Despite the decreased unemployment in November, single mothers, black women, and black men saw their unemployment rise. And the reason for the drop in overall unemployment isn’t a big surge in the number of Americans finding work. In fact, more workers dropped out of the labor force last month than found jobs—and all of the workers who left the labor force last month were women and female teens.

More numbers behind the headlines:

• Public sector losses continue. Last month the public sector lost 20,000 jobs for a total of 568,000 jobs lost in the public sector since the recovery began in June 2009. Nearly 66 percent of the public sector losses over this time are women’s job losses.