Over in the other Washington last week, they cooked up a Christmas compromise that extended access to the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation program by two months. People who had run through their 26 weeks of state unemployment (meaning they lost their jobs back in July and August), and people who had finished the first “tier” of EUC, were granted another 20 months. (There are four tiers, of 20, 14, 13, and 6 weeks’ length respectively.)
Here in the state of Washington, that means some 40,000 unemployed people who were looking at losing benefits on Dec. 31 can now recalibrate their estimated destitution for the end of February. (That’s not counting a further 20,000, who would have been out in the cold sometime between January and February.)
“Combined, that’s the equivalent of every adult in Yakima being spared a sudden loss of income in the next two months,” says the state Senate Democrats blog, The Hopper. They also mention that the unemployment line “shrank” in 2011, by 12 percent. They quote Employment Security Commissioner Paul Trause saying, “Some of the decline is due to an improved economy, and some of it is due to unemployed workers simply running out of benefits.”
“Some” is a questionable word to use when you absolutely know the percentage of people who have dropped off unemployment rolls because their benefits have expired. A record 503,000 people claimed unemployment during 2010, compared to 470,000 in 2011. That’s a difference of 33,000. About 70,000 workers were set to fall off unemployment rolls by end of this year, said the Hopper on Dec. 21. The extension helped 40,000, as noted. So that would indicate that 30,000 “expired.”
Not much room for the improved economy in there. (For those of you keeping track at home, yes, October’s preliminary unemployment rate was revised back up to 9.1 percent.) Perhaps you think that it might be interesting to compare the number of people whose benefits simply expired that month, versus people who found a job? Washington State’s employment security department doesn’t agree–you won’t find that data in their monthly employment report. When you fall off the unemployment rolls, you gain the gift of invisibility.
