Extension of Employment Benefits

EXTENSION OF EMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise to talk about the unemployment trust fund issue that has us basically stalled on Senate business; the fact that several weeks ago we had an unemployment benefit amendment that was part of the UC request for amendments to the FSC/ETI bill done, and yesterday it was in the queue to be considered; then after it was actually offered on the floor, after 10 minutes of debate and discussion, basically the amendment was pulled. Somebody objected to scheduling a vote on it.

For weeks we have been assuming there was a finite list of amendments and it was agreed that this amendment was going to be voted on. I don't even know that we need to have more time to discuss it.

I know now that there are those on the other side of the aisle who don't want to have a vote on it. Maybe leadership will be able to work out an agreement to have a vote. But when we have moved toward giving the American people some hope that we were going to discuss unemployment benefits in support of those millions of workers who have lost their jobs, they find out now there may not be a vote at all.

I don't think it is surprising that the Dayton Daily News last month basically said the GOP leaders were still dodging the jobless. That newspaper, in a State with high unemployment, thought we were not doing our job here, that those on the other side of the aisle were still trying to dodge the issue. I can tell you we are not getting a vote. It certainly feels at this point in time as if somebody is dodging the issue.

I wonder if my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, or my colleagues in general, have thought about the circumstances of the individuals in this country and the tough times they are facing. I know we see the face of the Iraqi people every night on television. Maybe it is too hard to put 1.5 million Americans who are unemployed on the 6 o'clock news. But they still exist. They, too, are still struggling. They, too, are looking for our support and help.

I want to share with you a letter I got from a constituent. It is posted to our Web site because we have had so many people responding and telling their stories. This one individual from my State said:

I am a 41 year old, recently divorced, with a 5-year old daughter. I had worked for Nordstrom for over 22 years, when I was suddenly without a job last August, and my unemployment benefits just ran out, which put me into a bankruptcy position. I only have minimal child support and no other income at the moment.

I was earning $47,000 annually prior to my job elimination, and had existing responsibilities based on that income, which I can no longer pay since my benefits have been eliminated. Being a single parent with a home and a 5-year-old to take care of, I have never been in a more desperate position in my life.

I want to work very badly. However, I have not been successful in getting hired back at Nordstrom or any other company. The IT market has declined, and my job was eliminated due to 7-year restructuring of the IT Department, which included the company's initiatives and achievements in job elimination and head count reduction. Their objective was to bring in contractors from India and use offshore outsourcing IT services as well. In fact, for the last 3 years, I have had to work with the offshore folks from India that took the place of hundreds of my fellow employees who were laid off over the last 7 years.

I don't understand how a company or a Government can say that they are compassionate for the climate, but create it by having Americans eliminated and replaced by foreign workers in the U.S. workplace.

My constituent says:

If the benefits are not reinstated, then I will have to seek getting other assistance until something comes up. All the jobs I have applied for, I have either not been called back, am under qualified, or over qualified.

This shows the humor of my constituent:

Most of the time, there are no numbers to follow up on, since they are handled via an automatic online HR recruiter. So I am not even sure if there are real people out there really looking for someone to fill a position. I have between 2 and 3 viable job opportunities per week that I apply for. So far, I have been interviewed only 5 times. At the time of my unemployment, I thought it would only be a temporary position. However, the jobs are just not out there and I am required to make at least $30,000 annually, even after my bankruptcy, to maintain my home and my daughter's day care responsibilities.

I live in a small house that was built in 1947 and pay roughly $1,100 in monthly payments on the mortgage. My car is 15 years old and in need of repair. My average bills are $2,000 a month, which are hard to keep up with, health care being so expensive. I don't want to lose my home, since that would not be in the best interest of my daughter. Besides, I don't think I could get much cheaper rent than what my current mortgage is. My property is my retirement.

I am scared to death that I won't have anything to fall back on after working this hard for the last 26 years of my life. I don't quite understand why I can't get the extended benefits until there are more jobs available, or at least until the Government puts an end to the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries. I have even pursued reeducation to a different field, but was told that I made too much income last year, and it would take a cost of $10,000 for retraining in the health care field.

Now, without unemployment benefits, because my benefits have been exhausted, a student loan would not be funded. Do you have any suggestions how I can get food stamps or aid or, in the meantime, how I can find any kind of time line when we might actually get a vote? I don't understand why the President would not want to help his own first, before those suffering in other parts of the world.

I think that letter sums it up. This is not somebody who hasn't been in the workforce. She was in the workforce 20 some years. This is not a person who didn't have skills and didn't help her company actually try to modernize and improve productivity. She did that. It is not somebody who is sitting around not trying to find a job. She is doing that, too. As she clearly stated, she cannot find a job. So now she has been forced into a bankruptcy situation, is being threatened with losing her house, all because we are sitting on the Federal unemployment benefit account of $13.3 billion and basically saying, even though this is a fund paid into by employers for this very purpose, in strong times of economic downturn, we are not going to give her the assistance.

We are going to pass a FSC/ETI bill instead and give other tax breaks to a whole bunch of things-$2 billion for a green bond initiative that I say still probably will end up getting used for a Hooters Restaurant. There is over $2.8 billion in here for another incentive program, a credit for synthesized coal, which is a tax credit that is under investigation by another Senate committee-$2.8 billion. That is roughly the cost of what it could take to extend the unemployment benefit program for another 6 months-a little more than $5 billion. Yet we are very comfortable today in making a decision to give all these tax cuts and tax breaks away, but we are not going to help the American workers with a fund they have paid into. We are going to hold that hostage as some sort of mark against our deficit, when it is a trust fund they have paid into and, instead, we are going to pass a bill called a "jobs" bill without actually taking care of people that have not gotten the support.

I am amazed we are in this situation. I think the Dayton paper had it right. People are dodging the jobless. They are dodging this issue.

Let's talk about the specifics. There are 1.5 million Americans who are certainly without help and assistance. This is 1.5 million Americans who, as of December 31, exhausted their benefits such as the constituent I just mentioned. They are going through the same situation she is going through. They are trying to figure out, now that the State benefits have expired, and there are very few jobs created-certainly not in a fast enough time period-that they are going to have to be like my constituent; they are making very tough choices. Because we don't see those choices on the 6 o'clock news doesn't mean they are not happening.

Let's look at some of the toughest parts of the country that have had to deal with this issue. You can say maybe not every State is in this situation. Certainly different regions have been hard hit. Certainly the Midwest has.

This chart shows the number of people in these States that have exhausted State benefits. They are still unemployed and they would be helped by our Federal program. They would be helped by the $13 billion that exists in a Federal account-if only this body and the other body would say, yes, you can have access to it.

Illinois has almost 70,000 people, who are like the constituent I read a letter about, who need help and support. In other parts of the Midwest, Michigan has 66,000; Ohio, 42,000; Pennsylvania, 69,000, almost 70,000 workers who qualify for health and assistance.

I do not even know that these people understand that the debate on this proposal is being considered. I know many of my constituents do because they write to me all the time. These are not invisible people, and their problems are not invisible. In fact, the Presiding Officer's State of Texas has 95,000 exhaustees. That is the number of people in that region of the country. In my part of the country, the Northwest, we have one of the hardest hit economies, the highest unemployment rates for the last several years. We have 33,000 people who would qualify right now for this program if this body would just say yes.

What we really want to say is we know that job growth is going to happen. In fact, last month there were 300,000 jobs created. The bottom line is, we have lost over 2 million jobs, and it takes a while to recreate them. By that I mean it takes a while for the economy to recover.

The Center on Budget and Policy Analysis says it will take several months more of robust growth to whittle down the number of unemployed to a more typical size. The truth is, I think a lot of people are saying: Oh, well, gosh, Friday we will have new numbers. Maybe we will have another 300,000 jobs. Maybe we will have another 500,000 jobs, maybe another 600,000 jobs created. To me, it does not matter if there are 600,000 jobs created in the month of April. It simply does not matter if we have 1.1 million people who have already exhausted their benefits.

Even if we have 600,000 jobs created in April, we will still have a million people who will not have access to the benefits they deserve. To me, it is an issue of what are we going to do to sustain the economy while we are waiting for the job creation engine to restart.

A lot of people say: Oh, gee, the economy is actually getting better; productivity has gotten better. My constituent helped her company be more productive. Guess what. That, I am sure, added to the bottom line of that company. It probably added to the bottom line that got passed on to shareholders. But did it help my constituent actually get a job or get a new career? No, it did not. She is not asking for us to give her a job. She is only asking for what she and her employer already paid into, an account that was created for these tough economic times only to get some of those funds in the interim until new job growth and new job availabilities are out there. I do not think it is an unreasonable request.

Some people have said: If you have 1.5 million people, and they have exhausted their benefits, what is the rate by which those people will actually find jobs? The Joint Economic Committee and the Center on Budget and Policy Analysis came up with a formula. Basically, they said about 3 percent of those 1.5 million people would find a job each week.

Some people say: Maybe we will think about unemployment benefits for 7 weeks. Maybe we will say let's give people 7 weeks of benefits for another 60 days, and let's figure out how that helps. We did the calculation. After 7 weeks, using this 3 percent of people finding a job each week, which is the number that is used in both good and bad economic times, it is an average, after 7 weeks of benefits, 458,000 people would find jobs. So after 7 weeks, those 1.5 million exhaustees-those are people who have already exhausted their State support but are still jobless-how many of these people would have a job? Basically, 450,000 of them would have a job.

The issue is, after 450,000 of them would get employed after 7 weeks, we still would be looking at 1.1 million people without a job, without support, being in the same situation as my constituent of bankruptcy, potentially losing her home and in a desperate situation.

Let's be realistic. We are not going to solve this by saying here is 7 weeks of unemployment. It is not going to happen. This economy will get better. It will. But it is going to take a while. You cannot recreate 2 million jobs overnight. You cannot.

The good news is, when you have a Federal program, which the UI trust fund is, at $13 billion, you can use a little bit of those funds to help those people in the meantime and actually generate stimulus in the economy. For every dollar we give these unemployed workers, it generates $2 of stimulus. Who is helped by my constituent basically having to declare bankruptcy and maybe not able to make mortgage payments? Who is helped by that? She is not, but neither is the bank and not the businesses with which she does business. Certainly her 5-year-old daughter who would rather have a home is not receiving any benefits.

If we adopted my proposal, a 6-month extension with 13 weeks of benefits, after that 6 months, the account, which was $13.3 billion, would still have $9 billion in it. So the account will be a very healthy account at the end of that period. Yes, we would pay money out to those individuals, but the account is continually paid into by other employers. That is the way it works. That is why it is a healthy account today, and it will remain healthy under the Cantwell-Voinovich proposal.

This is a bothersome debate to me in the sense of why are we having this discussion when we have a healthy account? We know what the individual problems are. We know people need to have support and assistance. We know even after a short plan, 1.1 million people will still be unemployed. Why don't we just do this? Is it because we are using the money for something else, and we do not have it available to us? Is it that we believe the economy is so much better that even a few trickling of jobs at 300,000 or another 300,000 announced on Friday is somehow going to solve our problem?

I do not think that is what other people have said. In fact, Alan Greenspan said recently before two different committee hearings that the unemployment extension benefit is a good idea largely because of the size of the exhaustees, the number of people who exhausted the benefits, those 1.5 million people. We have the chief economist for our country basically saying this is a good idea based on the fact we have 1.5 million people, and they are not going to be back in the workforce tomorrow. They are not going to be back in the workforce from the April numbers or the May numbers or the June numbers. So who are we kidding? The economy is not going to be that red hot to take care of 1.5 million people tomorrow.

The question is, What do we want to do about it? I think BusinessWeek said it best. They basically said the Senate must act. The Senate must bridge the gap that will help the economy cross over this extended valley of almost nonexistent hiring. They just said that on March 22-nonexistent hiring. Let's not fool ourselves. Americans know it; that is, if you poll them and ask them the question, Is the country going in the right direction or the wrong direction, they say the wrong direction because they know that we do not have job creation happening.

So it is up to us to make a decision. I know my colleagues are saying we do not want to have a vote. Somebody, in one of the afternoon journals, basically said, on the GOP side, that even having a standalone vote on my amendment is a nonstarter.

I am hoping wiser heads will prevail and that people will come to their senses and say: Let's have a vote on this issue. Let's find out where the Members of the Senate stand on getting their constituents' support in tough economic times.

Let us see where the Members of the Senate stand on following the advice of Alan Greenspan who says doing unemployment benefits would be a smart idea given the number of exhaustees. Let us find out where the Senate stands on having a solution to the issue of whether individuals should have access to the money they have paid into a $13.3 billion account through their employers.

Let us find out where the Senate stands on giving a solution on whether they think the economy is recovering fast enough or whether they want to help people in the times when economic recovery is still slow.

I hope we come to some resolution of this issue. I hope my colleagues will listen to their constituents and heed the words they are saying about the tough economic times we are seeing. It may not be on the 6 o'clock news, it may not be on the front page with four or five other stories as is the situation in Iraq and the Middle East, but there is still a struggle for Americans and their struggle deserves the help and support of the Senate.

I yield the floor.