States Slashing Unemployment Insurance

North Carolina joins a growing number of states that have reduced unemployment benefits since the 2008 meltdown. According to today's story by Robbie Brown, the states besides North Carolina that have cut benefits to the unemployed are Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina. All except Illinois, I would guess, are under Republican control. What makes North Carolina's new unemployment compensation bill, passed by a Republican-controlled legislature and soon to be signed into law by Republican Governor Pat McCrory, the most draconian is not the 35% reduction in the maximum weekly benefit from $535 to $350; nor is it the fact that North Carolina has the fifth highest unemployment rate in the country, at 9.2% when the national average is 7.9%; rather, it is the drop in the maximum number of weeks for collecting benefits below 26:

The bill also disqualifies 170,000 unemployed people — 39 percent of the 438,000 jobless — from federal emergency extended benefits because it reduces the number of weeks people can receive benefits to below 26. The federal government has set 26 weeks as the national requirement for receiving federal funds.

“Families struggling to secure their place in the middle class will suffer a grievous blow, and the state’s economy will lose $780 million in federal funds that are vital to reducing North Carolina’s high unemployment rate,” said Seth D. Harris, the acting labor secretary.

The reduction of the maximum number of weeks for collecting benefits to between 12 and 20 seems designed to prevent unemployed workers from tapping into the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) money -- another GOP-hatched scheme, among myriad other plots, to pauperize the working class; to return us to a Jim Crow, Dust Bowl, pre-Wagner Act America, the fevered fantasy of the neo-Dixiecrat Republican politician of today.

Life on unemployment is not a luxurious one of idle splendor. Having been laid off twice in the last decade and living in a state with good unemployment insurance, I still had to reduce my expenses substantially and supplement the weekly check from employment security by drawing down my savings account. Finding work is a brutal process. The weeks wash away quickly. I think six months, 26 weeks, the established baseline for eligibility, is fair; it assumes one is looking diligently in a regular job market. But in a new, difficult environment where we're dealing with 8% unemployment that appears almost structural, 26 weeks is not enough. EUC is vital.