Editorial:
From The Nation [1]:
The long-term unemployed now make up over 40 percent of all unemployed workers, and 3.3 percent of the labor force. In the past six decades, the previous highs [2] for these figures were 26 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in June 1983.
Instead of helping these folks weather the storm and find ways to re-enter the workforce, our nation is moving in the opposite direction. In fact, this past Sunday, 230,000 people [3] who have been looking for work for over a year lost their unemployment benefits. More than 400,000 people have now lost unemployment insurance (UI) since the beginning of the year as twenty-five high-unemployment states have ended their Extended Benefits (EB) program.
What makes the denial of this lifeline all the more absurd is the reason for it. As Hannah Shaw, research associate at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), writes [3], “Benefits have ended not because economic conditions have improved, but because they have not significantly deteriorated in the past three years.”
It’s all about an obscure rule called “the three-year lookback.”
Under federal guidelines, for a state to offer additional weeks of benefits it must have an unemployment rate of at least 6.5 percent, and—according to the lookback rule—the rate must be “at least 10 percent higher than it was any of the three prior years.”
[...]
Source:
The Nation
URL:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/167955/week-poverty-little-help-long-term-unemployed
Date:
May 21, 2012
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