Your Recession

Congress has passed the unemployment benefits extension that has been held up in the Senate for weeks due to a filibuster. The House of Representatives approved the measure by a 272 to 152 vote on Thursday, which sends the bill to President Barack Obama‘s desk for his signature.

“Unemployment benefits protect those who are have lost their jobs through no fault of their own but would lead to more jobs, higher wages, and a stronger economy for all Americans,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), according to NPR. “The money will be spent immediately on necessity, injecting demand into the economy, creating jobs.”

The bill will restore unemployment benefits to nearly 2.5 million people who have gone without work for over six months or more. These benefits ran dry seven weeks ago, while Senate Republicans and conservative Democrats filibustered the measure in defense of growing deficits. The bill does have a steep price tag, adding $34 billion to the national debt. The Senate finally voted in favor of the extension by a 59-39 vote on Wednesday night.

The bill finalized today will act retroactively; meaning those who have gone without payments over the seven-week period will receive compensation. After Obama puts his signature on the bill – which he says he will as soon as it gets to his desk – the payments will start flowing, possibly as early as next week.

After being sworn in Tuesday as the junior senator from West Virginia, Democrat Carte Goodwin provided the 60th vote needed to break a Republican filibuster and allow an extension of unemployment benefits to move forward.

The Senate still needs to give final approval to the bill which could happen today.

The extension doesn’t provide more benefits for those who have exhausted their 99 weeks, but it does allow for those who have been out of work for 26 weeks or more to begin to collect unemployment again. About 2 million Americans were cut off from promised benefits after the old unemployment benefits bill expired in May, a move analysts said was like “pulling the rug out from someone halfway through.”

Are you waiting for your benefits to be reinstated? Let us know. Either way, we’ll keep an eye on the issue for you.

We’re blogstalking today, and found this.

Tech writer. Loved her coworkers, the environment, but never got good at her job, she says.

“I’d sit down at my desk, spread open a binder of user manuals or guides and stare at meaningless words on a paper that talked about wiring and batteries and electronics. I liked the technical aspect of the language, and I honestly tried my hardest, but I’m no engineer.”

She put in two years, fresh out of college, and was laid off last week. There was crying. A lot of crying, really: “Matt made me breakfast, I cried. People called, I cried. People texted, I cried.” But the experience of being laid off was also liberating: “I was handed my freedom yesterday,” she wrote.

It really is like a Kubler-Ross process; you have to cry and scream it out before getting to “okay, make the best of it.” And if you’re fresh out of school and have no expenses besides student loans, well, that makes it easier.

What’s next? What’s ever next? Not to get all philosophical on you. It sounds like this particular blogger may go from tech writing to travel writing. But really, the open road is ahead.

photo: Amarillo Chuck

Do unemployment checks prolong the recession? To listen to some, sending those weekly checks just encourages people to sit at home watching videos on YouTube. But according to Les Leopold, author of The Looting of America, that’s patently wrong.

“We’re down 8 million since the start of the Great Recession. We aren’t even creating enough new jobs to keep up with population growth. So what jobs are the unemployed not taking?” he writes. “Economist Dean Baker suggests that the Republicans are trying to keep unemployment as high as possible right now because they think that high jobless numbers will spell disaster for the Democrats in November. And if we give the unemployed extended benefits, that money will act as a stimulus, generating more jobs. Well, we can’t have that!”

Besides, while it is true that some people use their unemployment checks for ill rather than gain, we can’t all be this guy.

Other myths Leopold tackles are the idea that people are simply too expensive to hire, thanks to benefits like health care and pensions, and the idea that the only “real” jobs worth creating are private sector.

On the benefits issue, well, Leopold concedes that companies could indeed save money by paying out fewer benefits to employees, but that it’s been shown that money saved doesn’t get invested into growth.

And the private sector ain’t really so private: “Has anyone noticed that private industry has been on the public dole for decades? We have millions of alleged private sector jobs funded by the Defense Department and through subsidies for industries from sugar to oil, and of course banking. We’ve given so many tax dodges to corporate America that most companies pay almost no taxes at all. The idea of a purely private sector is pure fiction, a soothing fairy tale for Tea Partiers and faith-based, free-market ideologues.”

So what do we do with this information? Take to the streets in protest? Write our senators? Or just cry into our pillows at night?

Since the recession began, a full 55 percent of Americans say they’ve been unemployed, taken a pay cut, had their work hours reduced or become involuntary part-time workers, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Social and Demographic Trends Project.

That number looks a lot worse than the official 9.5 percent unemployment rate or even the 15-20 percent rate that includes “discouraged workers” and part-timers. According to Pew, 32 percent of Americans have been unemployed at some point during the recession. Also, unsurprisingly, more workers went from losing a full-time job to gaining a part-time one than the other way around.

Half of Americans say their finances are worse now than they were at the start of the recession, and two thirds of them say it will take their families three years to recover. And many workers are delaying retirement.

Sound familiar? If you’re one of the 55 percent, none of this is news; if you’ve been lucky enough to have kept your job this whole time, it may be somewhat of an eyeopener. Fifty-five percent? Really?

Are you feeling a negative impact from that recession yet? If you are, don’t worry you have company.

In a new survey by the Pew Research, 55 percent of employees have experienced a reduction in their wages or daily hours since the beginning of the downturn. Also, job seekers have had to wait six months to find a new job, a far longer time-period than previous recessions, according to CNN.

The study, which was a mixture of telephone interviews and federal labor data, also found only 20 percent of workers’ finances have improved since the downturn began.

“This recession has left a mark on a lot of things,” said Pew Research Center project director Paul Taylor to CNN. “It’s changed behaviors and it’s changed expectations.”

Strangely, the groups most affected by the recession, African Americans and young adults, have more hope for the future than whites and older adults. And in the next year, 62 percent believe their finances will jump back into positive growth.

Photo by Sh4rp_i.

We continue our sporadic blog-stalking of MJD readers today by noting that one Bay Area reader is on the hunt for an editorial job.

“I just came thisclose to an editorial job at a well-known national website based in SF that would have paid more money than I could have ever dreamed of making as an editor, and would have allowed me to blog full-time for their website,” she wrote last week. She aced the first few interviews and then waited for two months.

“I emailed them and asked what the hell was going on (okay, I didn’t exactly ask that way, but had my life been a comic strip and not an actual life, herein is where they would have been illustrated as a wall-eyed, gangly chicken that I would ring the neck of and shake violently back and forth whilst demanding some sort of answer),” and a week later (on top of the two months of waiting), she heard something. Was it a yes or no? No, they were asking her to come in for a third interview.

They finally went with someone who had an MBA.

But that’s okay with this blogger: “A euphoric wave of relief crashed over me and I was okay again. No more anticipation or uncertainty. It was done; the job was off the table. Nothing about it was looming over my head like a little indecisive raincloud, following me everywhere I went for the last three months.”

Yeah. Waiting sucks. And this company has no business taking three months to hire one person.

Here is a picture of Francis Bacon, who is not the same as Sir Bacon.

Sir Bacon, whose blog we’ve been reading for months as we root for the former TV producer to get a gig that gets him back on his feet…has gotten a gig. Three, actually.

They’re all part-time, and possibly temporary, he writes, but still.

“To be perfectly honest, after 18 months off, I was really starting to believe like I would never get a job again.
“And let’s be straight up here, we know which way my stock was going with each day I was out of work.
“I’m beyond excited to be taking on these jobs and in the same breath, I can’t wait to find out what’s next.”

We’re so thrilled…and vindicated, because hey, it proves that there’s hope out there.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but when you have a passion for something and what seems like a great idea, you can’t let the crap economy stop you. Except sometimes it does stop you, at least temporarily.

Miriam Ramirez, former features/entertainment reporter at the Monitor in McAllen, Tex., wrote us to share her story. She left her job in 2008 in search of better opportunity, and then print took a nosedive…or continued the nosedive it was already in, maybe.

“So there I was…tapping into my 401k, cashing out vacation hours
(’cause journalists don’t take vacations like normal people) and
plotting my next step,” she says. “Helllllllo hiring freeze of 2008, 2009….er, 2010.”

She says she’s working in retail temporarily to pay the bills, but isn’t giving up on journalism.

“This is only a slight detour. I’m not ready to hang up my press pass!”

To that we say rock on, Miriam. Austin is a happening place and the hiring freezes are beginning to thaw. In fact, here’s an ad for an editor of a journal based in Austin.

Ed Murrieta was the restaurant critic at the Tacoma News Tribune from 2004 to 2008. Then he left to start his own food website.

2008, as you may recall, wasn’t the best year to start an entrepreneurial journalism venture, and he crashed and burned.

Now Murrieta’s on food stamps and has written a piece for the Seattle Times about the experience.

He’s pretty graceful about the whole thing, and the piece is a beautiful read.

“By shopping wisely and scrimping compulsively, by cooking and savoring each meal as a blessing, I am sustained. Even that mysterious can from the food bank generically stamped “Pork with Juices” promised culinary communion….My Catholic guilt tells me I am tasting karma after a lifetime of eating entitlement. I have never experienced hunger or wanted for food. To me, dining out has been a way of life. Now, it is a luxury — a coveted breakfast or lunch with a friend who picks up the tab, or a towering plate of $4 happy-hour nachos that I’m sure to finish, down to the last black bean.”