Copyright

(c) 2010-2024 Jon L Gelman, All Rights Reserved.
Showing posts with label unemployment benefits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unemployment benefits. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Workers’ Compensation Benefits for Injured Workers Continue to Decline While Employer Costs Rise

Study Finds Benefits as a Share of Payroll Approach Lowest in Three Decades

Workers’ compensation benefits as a share of payroll for injured workers continue to decline even as employment grows and overall employer costs increase, according to anew report from the National Academy of Social Insurance (the Academy).

Sunday, January 12, 2014

No Jobs, No Benefits, and Lousy Pay

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

There is nothing good to say about the December employment report, which showed that only 74,000 jobs were added last month. But dismal as it was, the report came at an opportune political moment. The new numbers rebut the Republican arguments that jobless benefits need not be renewed, and that the current minimum wage is adequate. At the same time, they underscore the need, only recently raised to the top of the political agenda, to combat poverty and inequality.
The report showed that average monthly job growth in 2013 was 182,000, basically unchanged from 2012. Even the decline in the jobless rate last month, from 7 percent in November to 6.7 percent, was a sign of weakness: It mainly reflects a shrinking labor force — not new hiring — as the share of workers employed or looking for work fell to the lowest level since 1978. That’s a tragic waste of human capital. It would be comforting to ascribe the dwindling labor force mainly to retirements or other long-term changes, but most of the decline is due to weak job opportunities and weak labor demand since the Great Recession.
One result is that the share of jobless workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer has remained stubbornly high. In December, it was nearly 38 percent, still higher by far than at any time before the Great Recession, in records going back to 1948.
And yet, nearly 1.3 million of those long-term unemployed had their federal jobless benefits abruptly cut off at the end...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Friday, January 3, 2014

Unemployment benefits, the cruelest cut of all

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

To 1.3 million jobless Americans: The Republican Party wishes you a Very Unhappy New Year!
It would be one thing if there were a logical reason to cut off unemployment benefits for those who have been out of work the longest. But no such rationale exists. On both economic and moral grounds, extending benefits for the long-term unemployed should have received an automatic, bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress.
It didn’t. Nothing is automatic and bipartisan anymore, not with today’s radicalized GOP on the scene. In this case, a sensible and humane policy option is hostage to bruised Republican egos and the ideological myth of “makers” vs. “takers.”
The result is a cruel blow to families that are already suffering. On Saturday, benefits were allowed to expire for 1.3 million people who have been unemployed more than six months. These are precisely the jobless who will suffer most from a cutoff, since they have been scraping by on unemployment checks for so long that their financial situations are already precarious, if not dire.
Extending unemployment benefits is something that’s normally done in a recession, and Republicans correctly point out that we are now in a recovery. But there was nothing normal about the Great Recession, and there is nothing normal about the Not-So-Great Recovery.
We are emerging from the worst economic slump since the Depression, and growth has been unusually — and painfully — slow. Only...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Where the 1.3 million people losing unemployment aid this week live

NJ is going to suffer the most by the termination of the unemployment benefit extension. Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

Darker shading means a larger share of a state's population will lose emergency jobless benefits on Saturday. Scroll down for an interactive map.
Darker shading means a larger share of a state's population will lose emergency jobless benefits on Saturday. Scroll down for an interactive map.
Darker shading means a larger share of a state’s population will lose emergency jobless benefits Saturday. Scroll down for an interactive map. (Committee on Ways and Means Democrats/Labor Department)
A projected 1.3 million people will lose emergency unemployment benefits when they expire Saturday.
Congress offered the extended benefits as unemployment ballooned during the Great Recession and has put off their expiration 11 times since. Renewing the long-term insurance is a top agenda item for the Senate when it convenes  Jan. 6, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said. The body is expected to vote quickly on a three-month extension of the benefits.
Recipients still face, at best, a delay in their checks and, at worst, a permanent end to them. When the aid expires Saturday, the unemployed will only be able to collect a maximum 26 weeks of benefits in most parts of the U.S., down from about twice as much in many states.
The recession may technically be over, but for many the recovery has yet to begin. The plight of the long-term unemployed — a group the benefits are aimed at helping and whose ranks have swelled — has also proven particularly difficult to solve. Studies have shown that they are more likely to suffer mental-health setbacks and are less likely to be...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Friday, December 27, 2013

Charts: The Worst Long-Term Unemployment Crisis Since the Depression

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Officially, the Great Recession of 2007 ended in June 2009. Yet the economic downturn remains in full effect for millions of Americans, particularly the nearly 40 percent of the unemployed who have been looking for work for six months or more.
In less than a week, emergency federal unemployment benefits for 1.3 million of these jobless Americans are set to run out. Proponents of ending the benefits argue that the economy is expanding and that the benefits prevent people from finding work. "You get out of a recession by encouraging employment not encouraging unemployment," according to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who opposes extending benefits. However, the data shows that while corporate America has bounced back, it is not restoring all the jobs it shed when the economy tanked five years ago.
Currently, nearly 11 million Americans are unemployed. The unemployment rate stands at 7 percent. Both of those stats are improvements from a little more than four years ago, when the post-recession jobless rate peaked at 10 percent and more than 15 million people were out of work.
However, there currently are more than 4 million Americans who have been unemployed for six months or longer. Not since the Great Depression has the United States experienced such massive and persistent long-term unemployment.
Overall, the long-term unemployed (those with out a job for six months or longer) make up nearly 40 percent of all the jobless.
Long-term unemployment has not affected...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

10 Reasons That Long-Term Unemployment Is a National Catastrophe

Today's post was shared by Mother Jones and comes from www.motherjones.com

Unemployment is bad. Obviously long-term unemployment is worse. But it's not just a little worse, it's horrifically worse. As a companion to our eight charts that describe the problem, here are the top ten reasons why long-term unemployment is such a national catastrophe:
  1. It's way higher than it's ever been before. When the headline unemployment rate peaked in 2010, it was actually a bit lower than the peak during the 1980 recession and only a point higher than the 1973 recession. As bad as it was, it was something we'd faced before. But the long-term unemployment rate is a whole different story. It peaked at a rate nearly double the worst we'd ever seen in the past, and it's been coming down only slowly ever since.
  2. It's widespread. There's a common belief that long-term unemployment mostly affects older workers and only in certain industries. In fact, with the exception of the construction industry, which was hurt especially badly during the 2007-08 recession, "the long-term unemployed are fairly evenly distributed across the age and industry spectrum."
  3. It's brutal. Obviously long-term unemployment produces a sharp loss of income, with all the stress that entails. But it does more. It produces deep distress, worse mental and physical health, higher mortality rates, hampers children’s educational progress, and lowers their future earnings. Megan McArdle summarizes the research
    findings this way: "Short of death or a debilitating terminal disease,...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Kansas, The Next Target: Unions expect difficult legislative session in 2014

Today's post is shared from cjonline.com

Negative legislation for workers included changes in workers’ compensation, collective bargaining and project labor agreements, which are agreements that set wages on particular construction jobs, said Andy Sanchez, executive secretary-treasurer of the Kansas AFL-CIO.

The Kansas Legislature passed a number of bills unions believe are unfavorable to workers during the
2013 session, and such actions remind the Kansas AFL-CIO to stay focused on its job in the
Sunflower State: to represent all working people, not just union members.

“I think there’s a lot of negative legislation that’s been passed in the past couple of years regarding unemployment benefits,” Sanchez said. “They reduced the number of weeks and workers comp benefits. We think that’s going to hurt a lot of people and we think it’s already hurting our economy.”

The project labor agreement changes stop government entities from requiring union-level wages on jobs. Unemployment benefits were changed to allow employers to avoid paying benefits if the employee broke even minor rules, such as failing to wear a name tag or being late.

Such anti-worker legislation, Sanchez said, made it even more important for local unions to work together in the political process. At the 24th biennial convention recently, leaders tried to stay ahead of the political process by throwing support behind candidates for the next election, even though it is a year out.

“This...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

The Appalling Stance of Rand Paul

"We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor....." Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com


I don’t put much past politicians. I stay prepared for the worst. But occasionally someone says something so insensitive that it catches me flat-footed.
Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said Sunday on Fox News: “I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for. If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers.”
This statement strikes at the heart — were a heart to exist — of the divide between conservatives and liberals about whether the social safety net provides temporary help for those who hit hard times or functions as a kind of glue to keep them stuck there.
Whereas I am sure that some people will abuse any form of help, I’m by no means convinced that this is the exclusive domain of the poor and put-upon. Businesses and the wealthy regularly take advantage of subsidies and tax loopholes without blinking an eye. But somehow, when some poor people, or those who unexpectedly fall on hard times, take advantage of benefits for which they are eligible it’s an indictment of the morality and character of the poor as a whole.
The poor are easy to pick on. They are the great boogeymen and women, dragging us down, costing us money, gobbling up resources. That seems to be the conservative sentiment.
We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor, in which poor people are routinely demonized and scapegoated and attacked, and conservatives have led the...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Friday, December 13, 2013

Washington is reducing the deficit but abandoning the unemployed

When injured workers are hurt, employers have the tendency to replace the workers. After temporary disability benefits are exhausted then injured workers traditionally look toward State unemployment funds to survive. Congress is about to severely limit that safety net by drastically reducing unemployment benefits. Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from m.washingtonpost.com

There's one big thing left out of the Murray-Ryan budget deal: unemployment insurance.
On December 28, federal jobless benefits expire for 1.3 million workers. These aren't normal unemployment benefits. These are the extended, emergency benefits meant to help the long-term unemployed.
A little-known fact about the economy is that short-term unemployment -- the percentage of the labor force unemployed for five weeks or less -- is back down to where it was before the recession. It's long-term unemployment -- which lasts more than 27 weeks -- where the crisis lingers.
No one has a very good answer for these workers. They're often stuck in areas of the country where jobs are scarce. They face a vicious cycle of employment discrimination in which employers don't want to hire them because they've been unemployed for so long, which in turn extends their unemployment and makes it even harder for them to find a job. And now we're just cutting them loose.

No Legislation is Stiring: Jobless Fear Looming Cutoff of Benefits

The US House of representative has passed a budget excluding the extension of unemployment benefits. Today's post was shared by The New York Times and comes from www.nytimes.com


Mary Helen Gillespie of Londonderry, N.H., is about to lose her last government lifeline. Since being laid off from a large banking firm in April, Ms. Gillespie, 57, has been living on little more than her unemployment insurance payments of $384 a week. She has burned through her savings and moved back in with her parents.
“There are times where I’ll go two, three, four days where I only have five dollars in my wallet and no money in my checking account,” said Ms. Gillespie, who worked as a corporate compliance officer at her previous employer,choking up as she described the difficulty of finding a job, any job, after her second extended period of joblessness since 2007. “I’ve been making decisions such as: Do I buy groceries or do I buy prescriptions?”
Ms. Gillespie’s 26 weeks of state benefits ran out this month, but she remained eligible for the emergency federal unemployment-insurance program, which has provided as many as 73 additional weeks of checks in states with high jobless rates.
Until now. Unless Congress acts — suddenly and unexpectedly — that recession-era initiative will expire at the end of the month. About 1.3 million current beneficiaries will lose aid. Also affected are an estimated 1.9 million more who would have been eligible for the program in the first half of 2014 after their state benefits ran out.
Democrats in Congress are pushing for an extension, which would cost the...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Extension of Benefits for Jobless Is Set to End

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

WASHINGTON — Unless Congress acts, during the last week of December an estimated 1.3 million people will lose access to an emergency program providing them with additional weeks of jobless benefits. A further 850,000 will be denied benefits in the first quarter of 2014.
Congressional Democrats and the White House, pointing to the sluggish recovery and the still-high jobless rate, are pushing once again to extend the period covered by the unemployment insurance program. But with Congress still far from a budget deal and still struggling to find alternatives to the $1 trillion in long-term cuts known as sequestration, lawmakers say the chances of an extension before Congress adjourns in two weeks are slim.
As a result, one of the largest stimulus measures passed during the recession is likely to come to an end, and jobless workers in many states are likely to receive considerably fewer weeks of benefits.
In all, as many as 4.8 million people could be affected by expiring unemployment benefits through 2014, estimated Gene Sperling, President Obama’s top economic adviser.
Historically, there has not been a time where the unemployment rate has been this high where you have not extended it,” Mr. Sperling said in an interview. “Why would you not extend now, when you’re dealing with the nearly unprecedented levels of long-term unemployment coming off such a historic recession? This would be the wrong time to do it.”
Democrats are pushing...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Christie Vetoes Bill That Would Have Prevented Some Truck Drivers From Being Treated As Independent Contractors

Today's post was shared by WCBlog and comes from njtoday.net


Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a bill that would have protected some truck drivers from being inappropriately classified as “independent contractors,” drawing criticism from one of the bill’s sponsors.

“Because of the Governor’s veto, unethical companies will continue to skirt the law by gaming the system to avoid paying their fair share of taxes,” said Assembly Deputy Speaker John S. Wisniewski.  “In doing so, they will also continue to deprive their drivers of Social Security, Medicare, Workers’ Compensation and Unemployment benefits.”

This “is just the latest example of the Governor siding against hard working New Jerseyans. His veto keeps in place a system that is unfair to workers and unfair to those companies that play by the rules,” Wisniewski said.

The bill passed by a 43-30-5 vote in the Assembly and a 21-17 vote in the state Senate, so lawmakers are unlikely to override the governor’s veto.

Under the bill, “drayage,” or short-distance truckers, and parcel delivery drivers could not be classified as “independent contractors” unless the employers can show that the workers are truly independent. The businesses would have to demonstrate to the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development that the workers are free from their day-to-day control, that the service is outside the usual course or place of business and that the employee is customarily...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]