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Twelve million to lose unemployment benefits in December
Without congressional action in the next month, over 12 million people will lose federal unemployment benefits provided in the CARES Act at the end of the year according to a new report. The sudden elimination of much-needed funds for millions of jobless workers portends a further collapse in the health, safety and well-being of millions of people and their families.
On Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, unemployment researchers Andrew Stettner and Elizabeth Pancotti with the Century Foundation estimate that 7.3 million workers will lose their benefits through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, while 4.6 million workers will lose access to monies through the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program.
This is over half of the estimated 21.1 million people in the US currently on some form of unemployment compensation, according to the researchers, who also found that another 4.4 million people, the equivalent of roughly every person in the state of Kentucky, have already used up all of their benefits.
For the millions who already have used up their yearly benefits, and the thousands more that will join them in the coming weeks, having to wait until next year is no guarantee they will begin receiving payments again. Byzantine state unemployment systems across the country continue to confound and frustrate hundreds of thousands of workers who have yet to receive their due payments.
Both the PEUC and the PUA program were created with firm deadlines and restrictions in mind. The PEUC program was designed to provide up to an additional 13 weeks of payments to people who had already exhausted their state unemployment benefits, which in some states provide 26 weeks worth of payments, although several are less, with Georgia and Nevada providing only 12 weeks.
The PUA program was designed for so-called “gig” or “contract” workers, such as Uber and Lyft drivers, or the self-employed, such as artists, musicians and other independent contract workers who are normally not eligible for unemployment benefits. This program is supposed to provide up to 39 weeks of payments, but for thousands of applicants, like Howard Booker in Las Vegas, months of trying to get what’s rightfully theirs has been frustrating and futile.
“I just want what’s mine, and I want them to give me my money,” Booker told a local reporter. After months of calling and reaching out to Nevada’s Department of Employee Training and Retention (DETR), Booker said he received a notice this month stating he was “disqualified from PUA” and that he actually owed money due to “overpayments.” Booker says he has yet to receive a “dime” from DETR.
Finally, there is the Lost Wages Assistance (LWA) program, which was created through an executive order by President Donald Trump that authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to spend up to $44 billion from the Disaster Relief Fund in the form of $300 payments. Every US state, except for South Dakota, applied for the program with nearly every state having already dispersed the available funds. As with the PEUC and PUA, the LWA program is slated to expire the final week of the year on Dec. 27.
These programs, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention federal eviction moratorium, are all that stands between millions of workers and homelessness and destitution . Despite the grave situation, which has led to miles-long food lines in cities across the country, Congress has yet to come to terms on a new relief package that would extend unemployment benefits and eviction moratoriums indefinitely.
After a letter issued by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday predictably did nothing to further negotiations on another bill, Pelosi, who was re-elected by her peers on Wednesday to lead the Democratic caucus in Congress again, gave no indication on Wednesday that she and McConnell were any closer to finalizing a bill to stave off disaster.
In fact the opposite was confirmed: congressional aides with Pelosi and McConnell stated to the Washington Post that “no discussions” were taking place on another relief bill. Instead the two politicians were working separately on another “omnibus” bill to approve spending legislation which would avoid a potential government shutdown before the Dec. 11 deadline.
“We will pass an omnibus… We are on a good path to do that,” Pelosi said to reporters.
Why is it that after months of so-called “negotiations” the Democrats and Republicans are no closer to providing relief, something both Pelosi and McConnell have stated they agree on, but can pass funding for the US Postal Service or fast-track Trump’s judicial nominations?
It is not because, as Democratic Party politicians claim, they and their Republican colleagues are so far apart on principles and figures that no deal can be had. Both parties came together with unprecedented speed and unanimity in March of this year, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average was tanking 10,000 points following the first wave of the virus’ spread in the US, to pass the $2.2 trillion CARES Act. With a 96–0 vote in the Senate and a near-unanimous voice vote in the House, the two parties of capital provided billions to giant corporations, the Catholic Church and Wall Street, while rescuing the stock market and the wealth portfolios of the ruling class.
No, the unwillingness on the part of the two parties to reach a deal is not a mistake, it is a definite class policy that is being implemented. It is part of the ongoing effort of the ruling class to offload the cost of the pandemic onto the back of the working class by blackmailing teachers and students into dangerous schools, so parents can go back to work and generate profits for the financial oligarchy. All the while the Democrats and Republicans continue to feign disagreement and separation on a relief package, while exchanging fist-bumps and pleasantries as over 250,000 people in the US succumb to COVID-19.
The pandemic Depression: Bailed-out US airlines slash tens of thousands of jobs
The United States is in the grips of the worst social crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Eight months after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and barely one month before the presidential election, millions of workers and young people are unemployed or underemployed and facing eviction, hunger and the loss of health care coverage. This coincides with an acceleration of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already taken more than 210,000 US lives, spurred on by the homicidal “herd immunity” policy championed by the Trump administration and administered at the state and local level by Democratic as well as Republican officials.
Fueled by the campaign of both parties to reopen the schools and campuses, COVID-19 infections are on the rise in 28 states.
On Thursday, some 50,000 airline workers were laid off or furloughed. Having received tens of billions of dollars in government handouts and virtually free credit from the Federal Reserve Board, compliments of the bipartisan CARES Act passed last March, major US airlines and defense contractor Boeing are carrying out mass layoffs.
The unprecedented corporate bailout was cynically packaged as a move to “save jobs.” But the billionaire bankers, investors and CEOs have used the money to permanently downsize and restructure their operations while further enriching themselves and boosting their stock prices. They destroy the jobs—and the lives—of their workers with complete impunity, knowing they will face no opposition from either of the two big business parties or the pro-corporate trade unions.
Meanwhile, the same politicians conspire to strip workers of the $600-per-week federal unemployment supplement, allowing it to expire two months ago, and permit state unemployment pay to run out for growing numbers of workers. Millions of laid-off workers, including some 600,000 in California alone, are unable to register for jobless pay because of antiquated and overwhelmed state unemployment systems.
The jobs bloodbath in the airline industry is part of a broader and accelerating corporate assault on jobs. On Tuesday, Disney announced it will eliminate 28,000 jobs in the US. Royal Dutch Shell announced this week it will be cutting between 7,000 and 9,000 jobs, while Dow Inc. said it will reduce its workforce costs by 6 percent.
As for small businesses, over 97,000 across the US have closed for good since March 1, according to data from Yelp Inc.
American Airlines CEO Doug Parker is leading the industry attack, announcing Wednesday that his airline will go ahead with 19,000 layoffs, or 14 percent of its pre-pandemic workforce. American received $5.81 billion through the CARES Act. Parker took in $12 million in compensation in 2018.
United Airlines is following suit, announcing that workers should expect about 13,000 furloughs in the coming weeks.
Delta, which received $5.4 billion in grants and low-interest loans from the government, started the year with over 90,000 workers and now employs fewer than 75,000. The airline plans to furlough roughly 1,900 pilots. Delta CEO Ed Bastian received a total compensation package of nearly $15 million in 2018.
It should be noted that the bailout scheme was supported almost unanimously by the Democratic Party and enthusiastically endorsed by Bernie Sanders.
The US government reported Thursday that over 837,000 new workers filed for unemployment assistance last week. The total pool of Americans on state benefit rolls remained at nearly 11.8 million for the week ended Sept. 19. However, the real number of workers receiving unemployment benefits, including aid from federal programs separate from state unemployment pay, or waiting to be approved, is 28 million.
Millions of workers are struggling to pay rent, utilities and car payments, and put food on the table for their families on the basis of their starvation unemployment rations. Nearly one-third of adults are reporting difficulty meeting their regular household expenses.
Restrictions on utility cutoffs and evictions have expired or are set to expire in dozens of states across the US. As of Friday, only 12 states and the District of Columbia still have disconnection bans in place for basic utilities. Over 200 million Americans are at risk of losing service, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association.
Meanwhile, the wealth of the 643 richest US billionaires grew by $845 billion, or 29 percent, in the first six months of the pandemic. The wealth of Tesla founder Elon Musk, who defied pandemic restrictions to reopen his plant in Northern California, surged 273 percent to $92 billion.
Fourteen percent of Americans, some 46 million people, say that since the virus was declared a pandemic, their emergency savings have been wiped out, according to a new study. Another 11 percent of adults have had to borrow money to cover everyday expenses.
Young workers in particular have been hard hit. Over half of people under the age of 45 say that the one-time $1,200 payment from the government under the CARES Act covered less than two weeks of expenses. Roughly a quarter, or 26 percent, of those ages 25 to 34 say they had completely depleted their emergency funds.
The response of the ruling class to the pandemic—Democrats and Republicans alike—has been dictated entirely by the interests of the financial aristocracy.
The catastrophe for the working class did not even come up in the first presidential debate, held Tuesday night. Democratic candidate Biden did not even mention the cutoff of unemployment benefits or the mass layoffs. In fact, both parties, controlled by different factions of the same corporate-financial oligarchy, support the use of mass unemployment and poverty as a club to force workers back to unsafe workplaces, so their labor can be exploited to pump out more profits to back up the trillions in grants and loans to the corporate elite.
The ruling class is acutely aware of the fact that it confronts mass social anger that threatens to take an explosive and potentially revolutionary form. Already there have been signs of massive opposition among teachers, autoworkers and other sections of the working class on the front-lines of the pandemic.
Terrified of the development of social opposition, a substantial faction of the ruling class, expressed most openly in Trump’s effort to defy the results of the November election, overthrow the Constitution and establish a presidential dictatorship based on sections of the military, the police and fascist militia, has decided it has no way out except through violence.
Trump’s biggest asset is the spinelessness and duplicity of the Democratic Party, which represents sections of Wall Street, the military and the intelligence agencies, in alliance with privileged sections of the upper-middle class.
Its role is to downplay and obscure the immense dangers to democratic rights and cover up the source of the crisis in the failure of the capitalist system. Its response to the mass multi-racial protests against police violence and racism has been to double down on its promotion of racial politics in order to obscure the fundamental class issues, presenting police brutality as the result of “white racism,” rather than the violence of the armed enforcers of the capitalist state against the working class. This aids the ruling class by sowing confusion and division within the working class.
The precondition for a successful struggle to defend democratic rights, contain and eradicate the pandemic and secure decent-paying jobs, housing, education and health care for all is a complete break with the political corpse of the Democratic Party and the building of a mass independent movement of the working class for socialism.
Popular organizations independent of the pro-corporate trade unions and the two big business parties must be established in workplaces and working class communities across the country—and around the world—to prepare a political general strike against the ruling class drive to dictatorship.
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