Response to Long-Term Unemployed
Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, we have a huge problem in our country that we haven't come to terms with, long-term unemployment. The number of Americans who have been jobless for over 6 months has hit the highest level ever recorded. I recently read an article that highlighted one of the long-term unemployed Americans. Her name is Cindy Paoletti. For 23 years she worked in the corporate accounting division of J.P. Morgan Chase in upstate New York. In December 2007, Ms. Paoletti was let go in a wave of layoffs that eventually shuttered the entire Syracuse operations center. Her job went to India.
She started collecting unemployment benefits and severance while searching for a job. In her own words, Cindy says, ``I apply for everything out there.'' Now that she's about to run out of benefits, she has started taking money out of her IRA. She doesn't have health insurance, and she faces the daily fear of losing her home. I hear similar stories from all over the country. Jobless Americans are desperately looking for work, but there just aren't enough jobs to go around yet.
Last week, I conducted a hearing in my subcommittee to discuss long-term unemployment problems. Here are a few of the facts highlighted at the hearing: nearly 50 percent of the unemployed haven't been able to find a job for more than 6 months, the highest number ever recorded, which goes back to 1948. More than 10 million jobs must be created to restore the labor market to its pre-recession level.
This huge jobs hole, created by 8 years of gross economic mismanagement under the Bush administration, has left five unemployed workers competing for every available job. In responding to these record rates of long-term unemployment, our first priority must be to maintain the current emergency Federal unemployment programs that have lapsed 2 weeks ago. People have been waiting for 2 weeks.
The House passed an extension on these programs a long time ago, but the Senate has yet to clear the legislation. If the Senate fails to continue Federal unemployment program, 5 million long-term unemployed Americans will lose their extended benefits before the end of this year, with 1.2 million of them losing their benefits by the end of this month, June. We need to face the fact that even with an extension of these Federal unemployment programs, more than 3 million people are projected to exhaust all benefits available before the end of the year.
We need to provide more help for these long-term displaced workers, which could range from additional extended unemployment benefits in high unemployment States, to federally funded jobs programs, to better training employment services.
A few months of employment gains, as welcome as they have been recently, have not suddenly eliminated the problem of long-term unemployment. We simply cannot abandon millions of Americans who have worked hard, played by the rules, and now find themselves with no jobs, no savings, and no support. We cannot let a huge section of the middle class go with nothing but food stamps.
At the end of the article, I mentioned earlier Cindy Paoletti said, ``Out of all the people I know that got laid off the same time as me, I think only three have found jobs. The rest ..... have exhausted unemployment or they're getting close to the end of it. Someone's got to do something.''
The Congress is faced with this. The Senate is dawdling. It is time, Mr. Speaker, that they act and we then move on to the next level while we deal with long-term unemployment in this country. We cannot close our eyes and believe it's going to go away. It will not go away. We have to help the process.
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