Extended unemployment benefits will end for
1,500 jobless Idaho workers on Jan. 7 and nearly
12,000 more will see benefits terminated over
the next six months.
Congress has been unable to agree on a plan to
continue extended benefits into 2012 as
President Obama has proposed. Without a
congressional agreement on the extensions, which
have been in effect in some form for 3½ years,
none of the 17,000 Idaho workers currently
receiving regular unemployment benefits will be
eligible for extended, federally funded benefits
if they exhaust their state benefits after Dec.
24.
About 45 percent of all unemployment claimants
are exhausting their regular state benefits of
10 to 26 weeks without finding work. The
exhaustion rate was 53 percent a year ago when
the state unemployment rate stood at a record
9.7 percent. It dropped to 8.5 percent this
November.
For the 1,500 unemployed workers in the last
phase of the federal extensions, their benefits
will cease on Jan. 7, and for the nearly 12,000
workers in the earlier phases of the federal
extensions, they will be allowed to complete the
extension phase they are currently in but not
advance to the next phase. That means about 300
workers a week will lose extended benefits
through mid-June with one-time terminations of
around 2,000 in mid-February, mid-April and
mid-June.
“Our local offices have intensified their
efforts to reach out to claimants who are losing
their extended benefits to help them find work,”
Deputy Idaho Department of Labor Director of
Field Services Roy Valdez said.
Idaho’s 25 local offices have made a concerted
effort to personally contact people in their
areas who have been notified their extended
benefits are about to end and offer them a wide
variety of services including job listings,
personal profiles searchable by employers, job
search and résumé workshops, training resources,
career planning, skill assessment tools and job
clubs and professional networking groups.
“All of these services and more are available to
the public at no cost,” Valdez said.
Since extended benefits were first authorized in
mid-2008, seven months after the recession
began, almost $800 million in the federally
financed benefits have been paid to over 150,000
unemployed Idaho workers, about a fifth of the
state’s total workforce. At their maximum, those
payments ranged from 27 to 73 weeks on top of
the 10 to 26 weeks provided under the regular
state benefit program. Nearly 13,000 workers
have exhausted all benefits without finding
jobs.
An estimated 65,000 Idaho workers were
officially counted as unemployed in November,
but the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
estimated 7,000 more have given up trying to
find work and another 40,000 are working
part-time jobs when they need and want full-time
jobs.
More information or the location of the nearest
Labor Department local office is at
labor.idaho.gov. |
