Unemployment Insurance

Floor Speech

Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, there are no more important issues for middle-class families across America than jobs and the economy. This is what they want their elected officials to be focused on. It is exactly what I think we ought to be working on every single day. That is why I have come to the Senate floor again and again to urge my Republican colleagues to stop blocking our attempts to extend and expand the middle-class tax cut so many of our families are counting on. That is why I come to the floor once again today to discuss the urgent need to maintain Federal unemployment benefits for middle-class families across our country. This should be an easy issue.

Unemployment benefits provide a lifeline for millions of families, and it would be simply wrong to cut off this support while the economy continues to struggle and so many of our workers are having so much trouble finding work. Right now, there are more than four unemployed workers for every single job opening. If every opening were filled tomorrow, we would still have more than 10 million workers across the country without a job to even apply for.

Additionally, nearly half of all unemployed workers have been out of a job for 6 months or longer, which is higher than we have seen for more than 60 years.

So millions of Americans are unemployed today, not because they do not want to work and not because they do not have valuable skills but simply because they find themselves in an economy that is not creating jobs as quickly as we need it to. Those unemployed workers are desperate to get back on the job. Unemployment benefits make all the difference for them and their families while they scour the want ads and pound the pavement and send out resume after resume after resume.

I recently sent a letter to my constituents asking for their stories about what these benefits actually mean to them and their families. The response to that was unbelievable. Within a few days, I received hundreds of e-mails. People sent me videos. They sent me pictures of their families. I received story after story from workers and families from across my home State of Washington who are fighting to make ends meet in this very tough economy and who cannot afford to have the rug pulled out from underneath them.

One of those stories came from a woman named Vicki, who lives in Maple Valley, WA. She was an unemployed single mom, lost her apartment, and told me she now has to share a room with her son in a relative's home. Vicki told me she has made every effort--going to interviews, sending out her resumes to hundreds of employers, still not able to find a job.

She understands that in this economy finding a job will not be easy, but she is going to keep trying, and the support she receives from unemployment benefits has kept her and her family afloat and made all of the difference. She said those benefits allowed her to put food on the table for her family and gas in her car so she could go to job interviews. She told me, ``If I lose my unemployment benefits, I do not know what I will be able to do to provide for my son.''

She is not alone. I heard from older Americans such as Judy. She is a grandmother of five from Bothell, WA. Judy told me she had been working for 47 years before being laid off from her teaching job in 2009. She said over the last 12 years she has worked to teach adults the skills they need to move into jobs as bookkeepers and receptionists and schedulers. But in this economy, although she was an expert in her area, even she cannot find a job in those fields.

She wrote to me, saying:

I want to work, but nobody will hire older citizens no matter how much experience they have. I started looking for a job at the pay level I was at when I was laid off. But after being unemployed now for 2 years, I am even looking at jobs for less than half of that. Still I am told my experience does not match their requirements.

For Judy, unemployment benefits are not the solution. She wants a job. But they provide her with some critical support while she looks for that last job before she can retire.

I also heard from Sheila from Bellevue, WA. Like Judy, she is close to retirement, but she was laid off last year from an engineering technician job that she told me she loved and now she is desperate to get back to work. After sending out over 500 resumes since then, she has had 4 interviews. In her e-mail to me, Sheila wrote:

I was devastated when I was laid off. I now look for work 7 days a week. I have worked hard my entire life. I do not want everything I have worked for to disappear.

She told me that is what would happen if her unemployment benefits run out now.

Finally, I received a video message from Scott in Olalla, WA. Scott told me that after working at the same company for 20 years, he was laid off in March and filed

his first unemployment claim in the 30-plus years he has been in the workforce. He said he always thought unemployment insurance was for the other people, never thought he would be the one collecting it. Now he calls it a godsend for him and his family. In his video, Scott told me about the uncertainty his family would face if his benefits expired before he could get back on the job. If this happens, Scott said:

I cannot imagine what it would do to my family to lose our home. We spend our money wisely. We live well within our means. But if we lost our home, we would be just another statistic. The last thing I want to do is to explain to my wife and my daughter that we have to leave our home.

That is exactly what he said would happen if he loses his unemployment benefits in this tough economy.

Those are just a few of the many stories I have received. There are so many of them out there. Millions of the people across America, including about 100,000 in my home State of Washington, will stand to lose their benefits that they count on if Congress does not act by the end of this year, in a few short weeks. These workers are not looking for a handout. They do not want to be a burden, but they need support while they get back on their feet and back on the job.

In this struggling economy, maintaining these unemployment benefits is critical. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said maintaining unemployment benefits is one of the most effective policy tools we have now to boost the economy and get money into the pocket of our consumers. If they are cut off, it would not just be devastating for the families who count on this support, it is going to hurt our small businesses and communities to have billions of dollars pulled away from consumers who spend it every month on food and rent and clothing. We cannot afford to have this lifeline cut off. Our great country has always been a place that stands with our middle-class families when times are tough and gives them the support they need to get back on their feet and back on the job and contributing to their communities once again.

I urge all of our colleagues to stand with us as the holidays approach, to maintain these unemployment insurance benefits that so many of our families are counting on, and to keep working to cut taxes for the middle class and get our economy moving again and put our country back to work.

On that last point, before I finish, I want to join our majority leader and so many others who today called on Republicans to stop blocking their own bill and allow it to be brought up for an up-or-down vote. We know the Republican bill that passed the House yesterday is going to fail. It is bad policy, and many in their own caucus apparently do not support it. Their bill takes some of the policies we are fighting for to support the middle class, including unemployment benefits, waters them down, and then adds a whole bunch of tea party red meat to attract the Republican support it needed to pass the House.

I am focused on delivering the tax cuts that middle-class families need and deserve, so I will vote against the Republican bill if it is allowed to come up. But I cannot believe that our Republican colleagues are now preventing us from taking a vote on their own bill and then not allowing us to come together, which we need to do in these last few days before the holidays, to get a bipartisan deal and get it to the American people. They expect us to do this job. That is what is holding us up.

I urge our colleagues to sit down, work out an agreement, so that we can all celebrate the holidays with our families, and the families out there who are counting on us will know we have done the job for them.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source