About one million laid-off workers will see their unemployment benefits end in January unless Congress acts quickly to renew existing federally paid extensions, according to a new survey and legislators and state officials.
The record-long extension of emergency benefits that was hastily signed into law on Nov. 6 was widely praised as an essential lifeline for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had spent a year or more in fruitless searches for jobs.
The new law provided up to 14 weeks of federally paid aid to unemployed people who had exhausted existing state and federal limits, benefits that already extended up to 79 weeks in many states. And for the majority of states with particularly high unemployment, it added an additional six weeks of payments, bringing the potential total to 99 weeks.
But many legislators, state aid officials and struggling workers apparently failed to read the fine print. The added federal benefits were built on a series of previous extensions that are slated to end on Dec. 31, unless Congress renews these programs before then. People who lost their jobs after July 1 of this year, for example, would receive no federal extensions once their customary six months of state aid runs out.
While discussions have started, Congress is not yet considering a specific proposal. And unless it acts before the Christmas break, officials warn, the extensions will end, leaving large numbers of workers with no coverage. If Congress, now caught up with the health care overhaul, delays action until next year, millions would face wrenching gaps in aid that many thought would be automatic.
“There are six people looking for every available job, and these payments are enabling people to pay their mortgages and put food on the table,” said Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, who championed the Nov. 6 law and hopes to light a new fire under Congress.
“It’s a horribly complicated system, and most people didn’t pay attention,” Mr. McDermott said of the need for quick Congressional renewal. He and Congressional staff members said that while they believe an extension will eventually pass with broad support, action in the next few weeks is by no means certain. Renewing all federally paid extended benefits for 2010 would cost about $80 billion, Mr. McDermott said.
Nancy E. Dunphy, deputy commissioner for employment security with the New York State Department of Labor, said that officials in New York and other states “were taken by surprise by this.”
“It makes no sense,” Ms. Dunphy said. “You had the president and others saying that the intent was to add 20 weeks of benefits, and now we have this glitch, if you want to call it that.”
For people suffering long-term unemployment, a gap of several weeks in aid — let alone a premature, permanent end — can be cataclysmic. Alexandra Jarrin, 48, was laid off in March 2008 from her job in New York as a director of client services. As she searched widely for a job, moving back and forth between New York and Tennessee, she received aid of more than $400 a month that, she said, just barely “kept my head at the waterline.”
But her extensions ran out early last month and in subsequent weeks, as Congress deliberated, her life fell apart. She has just started receiving what will be 14 extra weeks of aid under the new law, but has rent overdue and faces eviction from her apartment in Brentwood, Tenn. “There’s no way I can recover now, I’m too far behind,” she said. “I’m going to get kicked into the street.”
In ordinary times, unemployed workers in most states receive 26 weeks of benefits, averaging just over $300 a week, paid from state insurance funds. Many find jobs before exhausting the aid, but unemployment has been particularly tenacious in the current recession and recovery. Under temporary measures, workers are currently eligible for a series of federally paid extensions, awarded in stages often lasting 13 or 14 weeks at a time.
Some nine million people now receive unemployment insurance, five million on the initial state programs and four million through federal extensions.
Without renewal of the programs for 2010, at the turn of the year recipients will continue receiving benefits to the end of their current stage but will no longer jump to the next stage. Thus Ms. Jarrin will, if she fails to find work, finish out the new 14-week period but will not receive the additional six weeks that Congress promised. She said she has sent out 2,000 resumes and has had only a handful of interviews, without success.
According to projections released Wednesday by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group that worked with state officials to develop the numbers, 474,111 unemployed workers will exhaust their state benefits during January and, in the absence of Congressional action, not receive any extensions.
An additional 581,000 workers will see their federal benefits end in January, according to the study.
“Congress has less than four weeks left on the schedule to legislate this year, and then the clock will run out for a million workers,” Christine Owens, executive director of the law project, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Ms. Dunphy of New York said that without a federal renewal, 685,000 New Yorkers will not receive expected benefits in 2010. While economic growth has resumed, economists say that job growth will be sluggish, with high unemployment, now at 10.2 percent, persisting through most of the coming year.
The Nov. 6 extensions received overwhelming bipartisan support in the House and then, after six weeks of delay that led to gaps in aid for people like Ms. Jarrin, passed the Senate unanimously.
In addition to renewing the benefit extension, Congress must decide whether to extend aid for COBRA health insurance payments for the unemployed, a tax break on unemployment payments and a $25 a week increase in benefits, all measures that were adopted in the stimulus act in early 2009.
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