"It couldn’t have come at a worse time," said William Woods, who was laid off in October from his job at a candy factory in Harvey, Illinois, after 25 years. "It puts a lot of people that I was talking with earlier under the gun," he told reporters interviewing people at the unemployment office in the largely Black working-class suburb of Chicago.

Laid-off workers are normally entitled to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits from state governments. During economic downturns the federal government has routinely extended benefits to those who remain jobless beyond that period. Last March Congress passed legislation providing a maximum of 13 weeks of federally funded benefits to workers who exhausted their state-funded jobless compensation. The legislation, called the Temporary Emergency Unemployment Compensation (TEUC) program, expired December 28.

Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate had drafted different versions of an extension of benefits. But after failing to come to an agreement they simply adjourned in late November and went home leaving $24 billion unspent that had been allocated for benefits. As a result, workers whose benefits have run out will not receive any unemployment checks until after Congress reconvenes January 7 and then considers approving an extension.

According to a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, some 820,000 workers stopped receiving federal unemployment checks December 28. They joined another 1.4 million jobless workers who have been cut off from federal unemployment benefits since September. After December 28, some 95,000 more workers will run out of regular state benefits each succeeding week. By March 2003 an estimated 3.1 million workers will have exhausted their jobless benefits unless Congress extends its expired legislation.

"The [Congressional] debate over benefit extensions comes...when long-term unemployment is at a 10-year high, one in five jobless workers has been out work for six months or more, and the number of people dependent on the extended benefits program is rising sharply as more and more people reach their cutoff date," reported Paul Solman, business correspondent for PBS TV’s Online Newshour.

Part of the reason more workers have been running out of jobless benefits more rapidly than in the past is that the TEUC program approved by Congress last year was much shorter--only 13 weeks in most states--than the congressional program created during the previous recession.

The official U.S. unemployment rate reached 6 percent in November--about 8.5 million jobless workers, the highest number since mid-1994.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2 million factory jobs have been eliminated over the past two years; manufacturing employment, now at 16.5 million, is at the lowest level in 40 years. In November alone, more than 2,000 mass layoffs took place, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS); mass layoffs are defined as actions involving at least 50 workers from a single establishment.  
 
 
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