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My Position: Helping the jobless is always important, but today it is absolutely essential. Our economy will not recover if we leave millions of unemployed workers without adequate income to pay the rent or buy groceries.  We know President Obama shares our desire to help unemployed workers in the upcoming economic recovery bill.  We are planning a vigorous response to the worst recession in generations.

Whether you care about fairness for workers or about stimulating the economy, ensuring that workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own have access to unemployment benefits is the right thing to do.  We recently extended unemployment benefits, and now we need to take the next step to help States improve the program.

The Unemployment Insurance Modernization Act, H.R. 2233, would provide funds to help States enact specific reforms to improve unemployment insurance coverage among low-wage, part-time and other workers who now have trouble accessing benefits when they lose their jobs.  For example, the Government Accountability Office has found that low-wage workers are only one-third as likely to receive unemployment benefits as higher wage workers even though they are more likely to become unemployed.  It has been projected that if States came into compliance with this legislation, an additional 500,000 unemployed workers would be able to collect jobless benefits.  Economists consistently find that unemployment benefits are one of the most effective forms of stimulus.

The Unemployment Insurance Modernization Act, which passed the House during the last Congress, would provide up to $7 billion to States improving access to unemployment benefits, and the Unemployment Supplemental Assistance Act, would temporarily increase the amount of UI weekly benefits by $50. The average unemployment benefit is now just below $300 a week – 91% of the poverty level for a family of three.

Unemployment Insurance is the frontline of defense against poverty for working families, and boosting benefits would improve the anti poverty impact of the program. The Congressional Budget Office has noted that “it seems likely that recipients would quickly spend most of [their additional] benefits. For example, an examination of the experiences of long term UI recipients in 2001 and early 2002…indicated that their average family income was about half of what it had been when they were working. Moreover, more than one third of the former recipients who had not returned to work had a family income below the poverty line (measured on a monthly basis), and about 40 percent lacked health insurance."

Federally funded temporary extended benefits will help millions of workers. ■