No Federal Unemployment Benefits for Workers Laid Off During The Rest Of 2012

Jobless Americans are facing a cliff when it comes to their unemployment benefits. As a new report from the National Employment Law Project notes, due to Congress phasing out federal unemployment benefits that were implemented as a response to the Great Recession, U.S. workers who lose their jobs from the first week of July forward will only be eligible to receive 27 weeks of benefits at the state level, not the extended benefits that have been available for the last several years:

The [Emergency Unemployment Compensation] program is scheduled to expire at the end of December 2012. Workers who lose their jobs during the first week of July and thereafter will thus face having no federal benefits when they exhaust state UI benefits. Unlike prior authorizations of the EUC program, which provided for a graduated phase-out of eligibility for workers receiving benefits on the scheduled expiration date, workers receiving EUC at the end of the year face a “hard” cut-off: their benefits will stop. This means that unless Congress reauthorizes the EUC program by the end of December, no unemployed worker will receive any federal unemployment benefits for the weeks after December 29, 2012.

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via Workers Laid Off During The Rest Of 2012 Will Receive No Federal Unemployment Benefits | ThinkProgress.