Idahons facing end of unemployment benefits

Extended unemployment benefits will end for 1,500 jobless Idaho workers on Jan. 7 and nearly 12,000 more will see benefits terminated over the next six months. Congress has been unable to agree on a plan to continue extended benefits into 2012 as President Obama has proposed. Without a congressional agreement on the extensions, which have been in effect in some form for 3½ years, none of the 17,000 Idaho workers currently receiving regular unemployment benefits will be eligible for extended, federally funded benefits if they exhaust their state benefits after Dec. 24. About 45 percent of all unemployment claimants are exhausting their regular state benefits of 10 to 26 weeks without finding work. The exhaustion rate was 53 percent a year ago when the state unemployment rate stood at a record 9.7 percent. It dropped to 8.5 percent this November. For the 1,500 unemployed workers in the last phase of the federal extensions, their benefits will cease on Jan. 7, and for the nearly 12,000 workers in the earlier phases of the federal extensions, they will be allowed to complete the extension phase they are currently in but not advance to the next phase. That means about 300 workers a week will lose extended benefits through mid-June with one-time terminations of around 2,000 in mid-February, mid-April and mid-June. “Our local offices have intensified their efforts to reach out to claimants who are losing their extended benefits to help them find work,” Deputy Idaho Department of Labor Director of Field Services Roy Valdez said. Idaho’s 25 local offices have made a concerted effort to personally contact people in their areas who have been notified their extended benefits are about to end and offer them a wide variety of services including job listings, personal profiles searchable by employers, job search and résumé workshops, training resources, career planning, skill assessment tools and job clubs and professional networking groups. “All of these services and more are available to the public at no cost,” Valdez said. Since extended benefits were first authorized in mid-2008, seven months after the recession began, almost $800 million in the federally financed benefits have been paid to over 150,000 unemployed Idaho workers, about a fifth of the state’s total workforce. At their maximum, those payments ranged from 27 to 73 weeks on top of the 10 to 26 weeks provided under the regular state benefit program. Nearly 13,000 workers have exhausted all benefits without finding jobs. An estimated 65,000 Idaho workers were officially counted as unemployed in November, but the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated 7,000 more have given up trying to find work and another 40,000 are working part-time jobs when they need and want full-time jobs. More information or the location of the nearest Labor Department local office is at labor.idaho.gov.