Unemployment Benefits

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I compliment my friend and colleague, Senator Stabenow from Michigan, not only for putting this together but for being a clarion voice to the American people. She is one of those--and it is sometimes all too rare here--who talks through all the miasma and the fog, and all the barriers, directly to the average American. That is a rare talent and one that she shows repeatedly. I thank her for that.

I want to follow up on something my colleague from Rhode Island just mentioned, Senator Reed, which is this idea that people don't want to work, and if we extend their unemployment benefits, we are going to develop a lazy class of people.

Let me tell you my experience. It is not that the rate of unemployment is the highest it has been since World War II, although it is far too high. That dubious honor goes to 1982, when it was 10.8 percent in that recession. The difference with this recession is that people are employed for a much longer period of time and, second, it goes way up into the middle class and upper middle class--people who have worked hard their whole lives.

When I go around my State, I often meet with the unemployed. I make a special effort to sit down and talk to them. I want to share a story or two, in case anybody is unconvinced of the anguish they go through and their desire to find work.

I met a woman upstate named Dorothy, from the Rochester area. She was about 50, not married and spent her whole life in her company. It was her life. She had risen to be the third highest person in the human resources department at Xerox, which had a big plant over in Webster. She lost her job in May of 2008. My guess is--she never said how much she made--it was probably between $80,000 and $100,000 a year--a nice salary. She told me that every day--I met her January 2010, or approximately then--she went online to look for another job--day after day after day. She still had not gotten a job. It was very poignant when she told me, with tears in her eyes, almost dripping down her cheeks--she said that the first thing she did when she woke up Christmas morning was not go to church or to visit her family but, rather, she went online for 2 hours, in the hope that there might be a job that had been posted the night before, Christmas Eve, and no one else would be going online and looking for the job then and she could get first dibs. Is this a lady who is in the habit of laziness, of wishing to get $350 or $400 a week in unemployment benefits? Absolutely not. She is looking every day.

I met a man named Clay. Unlike Dorothy, he was a blue collar worker. He had six children. His wife didn't work. He is the only breadwinner in the family. The children were ages 2 to 14. He had ridden to the top of his trade in the machine tools area. He lost his job in the summer of 2008. He said that here is what he does every week: Sunday night, he gets in his car and drives to Virginia, looks for a job in Virginia on Monday. Tuesday, he goes to the Washington area. Wednesday, he goes to Baltimore. Thursday, he goes to Philadelphia. Friday, he goes to New York City. And late Friday night, he drives home. Then he starts the process again on Sunday night. He still cannot find work. He is desperate for work. He told me that now his children keep asking about the family's livelihood, because he is the breadwinner.

Are we going to cut Clay and his family off? Are we going to tell those children to go on welfare? This is a proud man and a proud family. To cut off benefits will affect 67,000 people in New York State; 60,000 will lose their benefits and another 6,000 to 7,000 will be prevented from moving to tiers. It is wrong. It doesn't look at the problem as is and is virtually inhumane and not part of the great tradition we have established in this country. I hope we will be able to pass this bill. I hope people such as Dorothy and Clay will not be cut off as they desperately look for work.

I yield the floor.

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