ui benefits

More than 1 million unemployed workers are poised to lose their jobless benefits in January if Congress doesn’t step in to extend the filing deadlines for the emergency insurance program, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group.
Although Congress just enacted an extension of jobless benefits — up [...]

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) has a message for his Democratic colleagues moving forward with plans for another job creation bill: hold your horses. In an interview with MSNBC Wednesday, Clyburn said the focus for Congress now should be “to get the economy stabilized and grow the economy,” but added, “I don’t think we [...]

Yesterday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters that Congress will likely stick around Washington well into December in order to wrap up legislation reforming health care and tackling unemployment. But he didn’t go out on any limbs to say what the latter bill will contain or how much help might be forthcoming. Instead, he [...]

As we mentioned here last week, the recently passed jobless benefits extension, though packaged as a boost for Main Street, provided many times more funding to the nation’s businesses, including the largest corporations. Specifically, the law allows companies to recover already-paid taxes by applying recession-year losses to income made over the past five years. The [...]

It’s no mystery that some Democrats are hoping to extend emergency unemployment benefits even further into next year — both to acknowledge a jobless rate that’s topped 10 percent, and to fix a filing deadline glitch that will prevent those in high-unemployment states from getting the full 20-week extension Congress recently promised them. The office [...]

The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) acknowledged today that, in order for people to access the full 20 weeks of additional jobless benefits enacted last week, Congress will have to extend the underlying program before year’s end.
“It is true that we will need to extend the program before the end of the [...]

Yesterday it was the Senate; today the House passed legislation to extend jobless benefits at least 14 weeks nationwide.
The count was 403-12. The “nays” comprised mostly conservative Republicans who oppose the tiny employer surtax that will fund the benefit extension.
The bill will provide an additional 14 weeks of unemployment insurance in every state, with an [...]

Twenty-seven days, four votes and a long lesson in tedium later, the upper chamber has passed legislation extending unemployment benefits by at least 14 weeks in every state. The final tally was 98-0.
Similar legislation passed the House more than six weeks ago, but the bill has been held up in the Senate as party leaders [...]

Regarding the Senate vote on unemployment insurance that went off a moment ago, it’s worth noting that the only opponent was Sen. Jim DeMint (R), who represents South Carolina, where the unemployment rate of 11.6 percent happens to be the fifth highest in the country.
We’ve got a call in to DeMint’s office to ask for [...]

The Senate on Wednesday easily cleared the last procedural barrier standing in the way of passing legislation to extend unemployment insurance benefits as long as 20 weeks nationwide.
The count was  97  to one, with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) the only lawmaker to oppose the measure.
The lopsided vote clears the way for final passage of the [...]