Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are wrestling over legislation that would extend long-term federal unemployment benefits. The measure passed the Senate yesterday, but the majority of House Republicans — according to the Roll Call Newspaper — are poised to vote against and extension of extra benefits to recipients who’ve had a hard time finding steady work. One of them is a Boston man I profiled six months ago. Life hasn’t gotten any easier for William DiCarlo since then.
DiCarlo used to work for the Red Cross and lived on a solid middle class salary. That is, until 2011, when he and 100 other employees were let go. Six months ago the 60-year-old Hyde Park resident was earning a minimum wage paycheck as a school crossing guard. As of this week when we checked back with him, DiCarlo is still working as a crossing guard, though he said he has sent out hundreds of resumes in the field of nonprofit marketing. He said he tries to put the best face on a bad situation.
“It’s kind of good, because a lot of times in the winter it’s depressing,” he said. “And in this case, I get out and the school runs from the fifth grade to the twelfth grade. The kids are nice. And as my wife says, ‘now you have something to do.’”
DiCarlo is one of 58,000 state residents who have lost their long-term federal emergency benefits. But not everyone supports extending them.
“Well, there is no free lunch here,” said Chris Edwards, editor of DownsizingGovernment.org at the Cato Institute in Washington, a conservative libertarian Think Tank that is asking Congress to end long-term unemployment benefits. “If the federal government spends another $25 billion on these benefits right now, it means another $25 billion that are going to be thrown on young Americans in the future who’ll have to pay back this massive federal debt … I don’t think the federal government should continue the emergency benefits because the economy is growing now and creating jobs.”
Unemployment benefits have long been an issue over which many battles have been fought on Capitol Hill, so it’s no surprise that liberal and conservative economists also disagree on its merits.
“Unemployment insurance benefits have been a lifeline to the long-termed unemployed in the current economy,” said Harvard labor economist Lawrence Katz.
Katz takes issue with the notion that unemployment benefits — which average $270 per week according to the State Office of Labor and Workforce Development — takes more from the economy than it puts in.
“Unemployment insurance benefits is about giving them some purchasing power, some dignity, some ability to have consumer demand to help the rest of the economy and to stick with it in the workforce not to drop out, which in the long run will cost taxpayers a lot more than extending unemployment insurance benefits,” he said.
But Katz’s colleague, Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer in economics at Harvard, argues that unemployment benefits encourages many people to sit around waiting for the best job to come along.
“Well there are certainly many, many people who are unemployed who are searching actively along the way, but there is more than one aspect to that search,” he said. “There’s what kind of job you’re looking for, and what wage you’re willing to accept. But the reality is, some people may only be able to be re-employed by accepting significant wage cuts. So to say that someone is searching is incomplete. It’s not telling us, are your searching and willing to accept the 20 percent reduction or 5 percent reduction or whatever is necessary in order to become re-employed?”
“I’ll take any kind of employment,” DiCarlo, who describes himself as a political conservative, said. “I’m not afraid. I’ve worked in a gas station. You name it, I’ve done it. I’m not afraid to work.”
Massachusetts Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Joanne Goldstein said Miron’s argument contravenes her own experience.
“We find that most individuals on unemployment are very anxious to go to work, and are actively seeking work, as you know, who are unemployed through no fault of their own, and they’re doing everything in their power to find a job,” she said. “We do not see people staying on unemployment in lieu of jobs. We do see people trying very hard to find jobs and using the unemployment benefits until they do find a job in order to pay for their housing costs, their food costs, their fuel costs and that it’s an essential benefit to keep them afloat while they’re looking.”
“The bills continue to rise and there’s no income, DiCarlo said.
With an uptick in unemployment in Massachusetts at 7.1 percent, Katz said that government could do more to help DiCarlo and thousands of others who have been searching for years for a full time job.
”We need something to support them,“ he said. ”We should be doing more. We should be providing extra incentives for firms to hire the long-termed unemployed, training and education programs. But in the meantime, unemployment insurance is the main form of support and it’s really not sensible to be cutting it off in an economy with record high long-term unemployment.“
Those unemployment checks were a Godsend, said DiCarlo.
”Well, it did help,“ he said. ”I think it comes out to like 50 percent of what you were making.“
But DiCarlo said he will continue to pore over resources at the unemployment office, scour the classifieds, and send out resumes — hoping that someone will send a letter back, offering him what he needs and wants most: a full-time job.
