What To Do for the Long-Term Unemployed

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The union is intently focused on pressuring legislators to move forward on two bills to give additional weeks of benefits to jobless workers. One bill, by Reps. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) and Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), grants 20 more weeks of benefits to workers in states where the unemployment rate is above 10 percent [...]

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The second bill — fuller legislation that is therefore the subject of more 99er activism — is Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s (D-Mich.) Americans Want to Work Act. That legislation raises the maximum number of weeks to 119 in states with unemployment rates above 7.5 percent, meaning 34 states and the District of Columbia would currently qualify. It also extends a tax credit to companies that hire workers who have been unemployed for more than two months.

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I would really like to see some more ambitious thinking than this. Extending eligibility to a hundred weeks or more seems like a humane thing to do given the state of the economy. But realistically, people who’ve been jobless for two years are more are going to have a very hard time finding work even in a hypothetical healthier labor market 6-18 months from now. We need to think about intensive strategies for helping people retrain and relocate—possibly with direct government employment at the end of the road—and alternatively transitioning some people to early retirement. If you’re in your 99th week of unemployment and you’re 59 years-old, it’s extremely unlikely that you’re ever going to get full-time work again and policymakers may as well acknowledge that in their thinking about this.

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Conversely, very long-term unemployment people who are too young for that to be a reasonable option probably need a lotof help reintegrating themselves into the labor market. Absent that kind of assistance, I’m getting worried that the legacy of this recession is going to be some kind of semi-permanent expansion in the size of the underclass.

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With TEF, the federal government offered toreimburse states for 80 percent of the cost of job-subsidy or certain public assistance programs. Thirty-seven states took the government up on it, leading to the hiring of 240,000 previously unemployed workers nationwide [...]

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The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities summarizedsome of the Emergency Fund’s achievements. One county in Tennessee used TEF funding to bring its unemployment rate from 27.3 to 18.6 percent in eight months. North Dakota used it to provide jobs for jobless parents without the means to pay their child support. South Carolina used it to give jobs to parents who would otherwise collect welfare. Illinois provided 20,000 jobs, 67 percent more than its goal. Alabama used it to gin up rural jobs.