{"id":47473,"date":"2012-05-21T09:21:10","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T14:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media.lclark.edu\/content\/hart-landsberg\/2012\/05\/21\/the-unemployed-background-noise\/"},"modified":"2012-12-07T02:40:21","modified_gmt":"2012-12-07T07:40:21","slug":"the-unemployed-background-noise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/05\/21\/the-unemployed-background-noise\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unemployed\u2013Background Noise"},"content":{"rendered":"

We seem to have a way of regularizing the pain felt by working people\u2014worsening living conditions become little more than background noise to business as usual.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

The situation for the unemployed is a case in point.\u00a0 We have a complex, but comparatively miserly, unemployment compensation system.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Workers are generally entitled to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits.\u00a0 However, there are two programs that potentially extend the benefit period for the unemployed.\u00a0The first is the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program, which was enacted in 2008 in response to the economic crisis.\u00a0 As the table below shows, the EUC\u00a0offers workers in states with high rates of unemployment up to\u00a053 additional weeks of benefits.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\"weeks-of-benefits.jpg\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Workers who exhaust both their regular unemployment insurance and EUC benefits can receive additional support through the second program, the permanent federal-state Extended Benefits (EB) program.\u00a0 As the table above shows, that program offers\u00a0a maximum of\u00a020 extra\u00a0weeks of benefits depending on state unemployment rate levels. \u00a0However, there is an additional provision\u00a0to the EB program that is now coming into play with negative consequences.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As Hanna Shaw, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,\u00a0explains:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A state may offer additional weeks of UI benefits through EB if its unemployment rate reaches certain thresholds . . . and if this rate is at least 10 percent higher than it was in any of the three prior years.\u00a0 But unemployment rates have remained so elevated for so long that most states no longer meet this latter criterion (referred to as the \u201cthree-year lookback\u201d).\u00a0 <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because of this lookback provision\u00a0hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers are now losing benefits, not because conditions are improving but because they are not continuing to worsen.\u00a0The table below highlights the 25 states that have been forced to stop\u00a0providing EB benefits this year and the number of workers in each state that have been cut adrift as a result.\u00a0 Look at California\u2013more than 95,000 workers have lost\u00a0their benefits so far\u00a0this year despite the fact that the state\u00a0unemployment rate is\u00a0almost 11 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"5-14-12ui-table.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is no accidental outcome.\u00a0 In fact, according to Shaw, <\/span><\/p>\n

Policymakers could have addressed the \u201clookback\u201d when they extended federal UI at the beginning of the year, but they didn\u2019t. \u00a0Instead, Congress not only allowed EB payments to fade out, but it also made changes that over the course of the year will reduce the number of weeks of benefits available in the temporary Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program, which provides up to 53 additional weeks to the long-term unemployed based on the unemployment rate in their state.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How serious is the long term unemployment problem? \u00a0Check out the chart<\/a> below. \u00a0As it shows, the share of the labor force that is unemployed for more than 26 weeks is higher than at any point in the last six decades. \u00a0Perhaps even more striking is the fact that 41.3 percent\u00a0of the 12.5 million people who were unemployed in April 2012 had been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\"222-ltu-opt.jpg\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In terms of the master narrative, this is just another of the necessary adjustments required to stabilize the \u201csystem;\u201d no need for alarm.\u00a0 Makes you wonder about the aims of the system, doesn\u2019t it?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\nMartin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College<\/a>. You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We seem to have a way of regularizing the pain felt by working people\u2014worsening living conditions become little more than background noise to business as usual.\u00a0
\nThe situation for the unemployed is a case in point.\u00a0 We have a complex, but comparatively miserly, unemployment compensation system.\u00a0
\nWorkers are generally entitled to 26 weeks of unemployment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1853,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1853"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47473"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47475,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47473\/revisions\/47475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}