Senator Reed Rises in Support of Federal Unemployment Benefits Amendment

Mr. REED. Mr. President, today I join with Senator Durbin and several other of my colleagues in calling for an extension of Federal unemployment benefits for the 1 million long-term unemployed workers who have exhausted their benefits and were not aided by the legislation that we passed on January 8.

On January 8, we passed a bill that extended benefits to unemployed workers who were cut off from receiving their benefits on December 28. With the December 28th deadline, approximately 800,000 workers were cut off from receiving their benefits. We essentially gave them 13 weeks of extended benefits, but in doing so we neglected to provide additional benefits for a million Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—first, their State benefits of 26 weeks, and then their extended Federal unemployment benefits.

In recent recessions, Congress always acted to respond to the plight of these unemployed Americans who are searching for work, trying to maintain their households, and trying to maintain their families. In the early 1990s, Congress extended benefits five different times—three of those times during the Presidency of President George Herbert Walker Bush.

In contrast to the 1990s, the situation is even greater today. At the end of December 2002, an estimated 2.2 million workers exhausted their Federal benefits; whereas, in the recession of the 1990s, approximately 1.4 million Americans had exhausted those benefits.

Where is this crisis affecting Americans? It is everywhere. It is estimated that of these 1 million jobless Americans, about 56,800 are from Texas; 44,000 are from Pennsylvania; 43,500 are from Ohio; 37,600 are from North Carolina; 53,000 are from Illinois; 20,000 are from Indiana; 27,000 are from Tennessee; 18,000 are from South Carolina; and 84,000 are from New York. And the list goes on and on.

This is not a rollcall to be proud of because it represents the fact that the economy is not working. These are not small numbers. We overlooked a lot of those Americans when we took partial action on January 8.

This is not just about numbers. This is about people.

I think there is an erroneous perception that somehow these people are not looking hard enough for work; that they are really the hard-core unemployed, transient workers; that somehow they just don't deserve our help. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I will share some stories that have appeared in the press about people who are struggling with this dilemma of unemployment. I think you will find these people are very similar to people in your neighborhoods, in your families. They are Americans who want to work but in this economy cannot find work.

And there is something else that is going on here, too. This economic dilemma has some characteristics of a cyclical unemployment cycle, but many economists believe there are structural issues at work. You see, this is the situation where, for the first time in recent memory, many of these unemployed Americans are highly skilled, highly educated, and highly motivated. Yet they cannot find work.

For example, Laura Carson of Easton, MA, lost her job in July of 2001. She was a human resources executive. She worked for approximately 17 years, since she graduated from Suffolk University. She has applied for unemployment insurance. She exhausted her State benefits, and then she exhausted her extended benefits. She is still looking. She tried to get a job this holiday season in a retail shop, but she could not find work. She is still looking. Just to survive, she has gone ahead and refinanced her house and taken out a home equity loan. But that is only putting off the inevitable, as bills keep crashing in upon her.

These are the types of people we are trying to help: Susan Brown of Chappaqua, NY, lost her job as a consultant 18 months ago. She used to be a principal in a firm that specialized in Web design. She is one of the victims of this technological bubble that burst. Her company went belly-up in 2001.

This is a woman who has worked for 18 years since she got out of college. She worked through high school and put herself through college. This is exactly what we like to reward in America: hard work, discipline, and dedication. She got remarried over the summer and, ironically—but in this market, not surprisingly—her husband lost his job, also. She has had to dip into her 401(k) plan to make ends meet. She is still looking but still very frustrated about finding work. She said:

There are just no jobs. I can't even tell you how hard it is.

And prior to her loss of employment, she was making $200,000 a year. This is an example of this new phenomenon where highly skilled, highly motivated, highly educated people just can't find comparable employment in this recession.

Jules Berman of Queens was laid off from his job. He worked for almost 30 years for a New York candy company. He filed for unemployment insurance in December 2001, and he has seen his benefits exhausted. He has never been out of work before in his entire work life.

What you are seeing, again, if you do the math: after 30 years, seeing middle-aged men and women, who are losing their jobs for the first time in their work history, who thought—as we all did, our contemporaries—if you worked hard, got a good education, got in with a good company and strived and struggled each day, you certainly could work until you retired on your pension and your Social Security. That is not the case. And now, at the age of 50, with mortgages, with children who are going to college, with health care bills and health care concerns, they are looking for a job.

That is the reality, and it is not just in the Northeast. Eric Strubble lives in Newcastle, CA. He was laid off from Hewlett-Packard—another example of the huge downturn in technology companies that has taken place in the last few years. He has filled the gap with these unemployment benefits, but, as he said:

Obviously, if we had to live off it, there would be no way, but it helps stretch things out a bit.

People don't get unemployment insurance because they don't want to work. It is a fraction of what you make in your salary check each week. The average unemployment benefit is about $256. It does not make up for your lost wages. It allows you, as Mr. Strubble says, to "stretch things out a bit" until you get on your feet.

Joyce Smith, 52, of Ardmore, TN, exhausted her $190-a-week benefit in August. She was a factory worker. As she said:

There's not much out there. They don't want people my age. It's been a panic and a struggle, and you just go into a depression.

Gary Hineman of Morgantown, PA, an unemployed steelworker who is 48 years old, has worked his whole life. In fact, he fibbed about his age at 16 just to get in the Steelworkers Union. He worked all his life, worked hard, and yet he is looking desperately for work. He said:

If I could speak to Members of Congress, I would tell them to see how we live and how we feel. They want the economy to pick up, but there are no jobs to pick it up with.

That is Mr. Hineman. His wife Michelle works as a grocery clerk. They are getting by on her $15-an-hour job.

Mr. Hineman said: "That is the only thing I've got going for me." These are examples. These are the realities. These are the people we are trying to help and we should help: hard-working Americans. Yet we neglected 1 million of them.

Now, as the comments of these individuals suggest, this is a reflection of an economy that is not working. For the first time in 8 years, family incomes have fallen; poverty is increasing; families at all income levels are losing their health insurance; gross domestic product is growing, but it is not growing fast enough to make up the jobs that are necessary so these people can get back to work.

Indeed, the reality for most Americans today is, they live on their paychecks not their portfolios. When the paycheck stops, they are in very difficult circumstances. Our proposal is very simple: Let's give these individuals some more extended unemployment benefits so they can stretch it out a bit longer, find that job, make decisions that are going to get them back in the workforce.

Let me point out that our economy has lost over 2.2 million private payroll jobs since President Bush took office. The unemployment rate is currently 6 percent—nearly 2 percentage points higher than when President Bush took office. Long-term unemployment is very high, and that is the issue we are dealing with in this amendment: giving some support to these long-term unemployed.

By the way, I cannot think of a more efficient stimulus program than giving people looking for work unemployment benefits to tide them over until they find work. The money goes directly to them and directly into the economy. So from the standpoint of economic policy, that makes sense. Certainly from the standpoint of helping citizens of this country, it makes a great deal of sense.

The unemployment insurance trust fund has a $24 billion surplus. The funds are there. We should access them and allow these individuals additional benefits. We have to do more to help working Americans to make sure they make it through a very difficult, very challenging economic situation.

We have done it before, and I hope we can do it again. I hope we will do it again in this bill. This is an issue of great concern for our economy, but, as I have tried to illustrate with these individual stories, this is about our neighbors, people we live with back in our home States, the people we represent, the people who have worked all their lives; and all they want is a chance to keep their heads above water until they can find that job, as they look for that job day in and day out.

I think it is the least we can do for them. I hope we will do it. I am pleased and proud to be joined by Senator Durbin as a cosponsor. I know he will return a bit later to make his comments.

I hope we can, in fact, take up this amendment, adopt it on a strong bipartisan basis, and make sure that all long-term unemployed, not just those who were satisfied in the last legislation—but all the long-term unemployed—get a chance for extended benefits.

I yield the floor.