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Unemployment Benefits – It Could Be You

We gathered for the funeral of our youngest brother, Duff.  I have not seen my two half-brothers, who will remain unnamed, for several years.  My family lives in South Bend, Indiana and I in Memphis.  I claim full responsibility for our estrangement.  I left my childhood home at sixteen and never looked back.  My family, the people with whom I had grown up, were an anchor around my neck.  I set an intention. Today I know this as a sankalpa:  I am free, completely free from the past and living a new life.  I made up my mind not to live out my life as the wife of a factory worker or worse yet, an unemployed factory worker.  I went back to visit once when my father, Carl, who had esophageal cancer, was given just a few months to live.  We made our peace.  I did not attend his funeral.  But when I learned that Duff had stage four lung cancer I made my pilgrimage.  I went to support him and my family.  We convened, as a family, one last time for the funeral.

So here we are in the kitchen of what was my father’s last house.

My middle brother is sitting in a recliner across the room from me.  “How long have you been out of work?” I asked.

Looking down at the floor, he mumbles, “For a year now.  It sucks.  I have to check in at the unemployment office every week and prove that I have applied for a job, which I am happy to do. But, everything is done on computer now.  I have never worked on a PC.  To keep my benefits, I had to sign up for a computer class.  I feel like such an idiot.  I just want to go back to building trailers.”  Since he dropped out of high school my brother worked at a factory in Elkhart, Indiana on an assembly line.  He never missed a day, driving all the way from South Bend, even in the heaviest of snows.  Then the big recession hit.  He is in his fifties.  There are no more factory jobs in northern Indiana.  “I got a part time job working for a company that builds UPS trucks.  Contract worker.  No benefits, and they could call any time and tell me not to come in.  I have bills to pay.  I felt like slave, but i stayed with it.  Then they laid me off.  They couldn’t say so but I know they wanted someone younger who could work faster.  So here I am, still looking.”  And he did look for another year.  He complied with the new standards for unemployment benefits.  He even got a rebuilt computer so he could put together a resume and look for work on line while sitting at home waiting.  Eventually he was hired by to be a night janitor.  He loves it.  Kind of a loner anyway, he goes to work, does his job and comes home to his house and two dogs.

I talked to my brother on the phone not long after he found this job.  He sounded like a different person.  He was so grateful. “I love my job.  I go in after everyone else is gone.  I clean.  I have the whole place to myself. No one bothers me. I work at my own pace. It is great.  I love going to work.”  He was miserable when he had nothing to do. He had no purpose.  Like so many others, 1.4 million, he really wanted to work, but it took him two long years to find employment.  What would he have done without unemployment benefits?

Please read this “opinion” and think about what our government is doing to those, who like my brother, want to work, but cannot find a job.  Should they end up homeless?

Last week, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez convened a group of the long-term unemployed to share their stories with members of his department’s staff.  All were over 50 and once held white-collar jobs; some earned six-figure salaries. The session was heartbreaking but also inspiring — and it made me wonder why Democrats aren’t screaming louder, in sheer outrage, about this GOP exercise in gratuitous inhumanity.

There was Carol Scott of Baltimore, who lost her job as a program administrator at Johns Hopkins University medical school in 2010. With a master’s degree in psychology, she keeps getting told that she is overqualified for jobs paying less, which she would happily take. She has been scraping by with help from her mother and sister, in addition to unemployment benefits.

There was Kevin Meyer from New Jersey, who lost his job in corporate communications, accepted another job at a 40 percent pay cut, and then lost that job too. He said that in the last two years he has sent out hundreds of resumes, sat for about two dozen fruitless interviews and endured a cancer diagnosis and treatment. Now, he said, he is “racing the clock to avoid foreclosure.”

There was Johnetta Thurston of Odenton, Md., who lost her position as a human resources executive in May 2011 and continues to apply for job after job. After being turned down, she always calls to ask why; if it was because she lacked a particular skill or professional certification, she goes out and gets it. She managed to win a few short-term consulting contracts, but the last one ended in October.

There was George Meaghan of Paramus, N.J., who in December 2012 was laid off by Citigroup after 33 years. “I thought it would be easy to find a job,” he said, “and it’s shocking to be sitting here a year later.” He was lucky enough to be given a severance package, but he said that money is now exhausted and he has started to cannibalize his retirement savings. Most of the others around the table said they have drained their 401(k) accounts.

And there was Steve Bolton, who lives in the Washington area. Bolton spent 22 years in the Army before retiring and going to work for a defense contractor. He was laid off last June and now finds himself “at the bottom of my barrel,” with no savings left and no job in sight. “Fortunately, we were able to pay our mortgage this month,” he said.

These are people whose lives have been buffeted by forces beyond their control — the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, globalization and outsourcing, irrational federal spending cuts. They have skills and experience; they are willing to reinvent themselves. Isn’t it in society’s interest to give them a chance?

It has been common practice for the federal government to extend unemployment benefits in hard economic times — and to do so on a bipartisan basis, without insisting that the funds be taken out of some other program’s hide. The cost of a full one-year extension would be just $25 billion, little more than a rounding error in a trillion-dollar federal budget.

It would be sound economic policy for the government to finance that extension through borrowing. Interest rates are at historic lows and the deficit has been falling dramatically, making this a good time for capital investments. In this case, rather than building roads or airports, we would be investing in the nation’s human capital.

And spending that money would create about 200,000 jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office — thus putting some of the long-term unemployed back to work.

But while Congress inches forward, probably toward some kind of extension, lives are falling apart. All day, every day, Democrats ought to be making a loud and righteous noise over this disgraceful state of affairs.

Contact columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post Writers Group at eugenerobinson@washpost.com.