The Half in Ten Campaign applauds President Obama for supporting key job creation policies including extending unemployment insurance and COBRA health insurance benefits for the unemployed, and providing additional aid to state and local governments to save jobs, spur demand, and importantly, help, the most vulnerable weather this recession.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a critical step to help us avert another Great Depression, and is already projected to have saved or created approximately 1.6 million jobs. Yet even as the economy turns the corner, economists are predicting prolonged periods of high unemployment. President Obama’s speech included strategies to tackle the jobless rate by helping small businesses, investing in infrastructure, and growing clean energy jobs.

In addition to these kinds of investments, however, we can and we must enact policies to ensure that job creation efforts lift up all Americans, including those in low-income communities that were in crisis even before the Great Recession of 2007-2009 began. While the average unemployment rate is 10 percent, jobless rates are disproportionately high among women heads of households (11.4 percent), Hispanics (12.7 percent), and African-American men over 20 (16.9 percent).

To that end, the Half in Ten Campaign is urging Congress to act urgently to create jobs through:

• Aid to states and localities to save jobs and prevent cuts to needed services.
• Investments in work supports and safety net programs. Investing in programs such as unemployment insurance, SNAP/Food Stamps, refundable tax credits, and childcare/early Head Start programs not only helps the most vulnerable but also helps all Americans by spurring economic demand that will ripple throughout the economy to create jobs.
• A program to create public-service jobs that meet community needs, such as childcare and weatherization, while offering employment opportunities to marginalized communities.
• Strategic investments in our national service programs to offer job opportunities to young workers while strengthening the capacity of nonprofits to respond to growing poverty.
• On-the-job training and other programs that provide incentives to train and hire low-income workers.

The Half in Ten Campaign encourages the Obama administration and Congress to act now to create jobs for all Americans, including those who have traditionally been left behind during economic recoveries. Without a focused government effort on including traditionally excluded communities, poverty rates will remain unconscionably high as will disparities by race and gender.

A strategy to create decent-wage jobs and ensure that low-income workers have the opportunity to access them will be at the heart of both comprehensive poverty reduction efforts and rebuilding our economy to ensure shared prosperity for all. Half in Ten looks forward to working with Congress and the Obama administration to promote job creation that reflects these principles.

Originally Posted at: americanprogressaction.org

Alexandra Cawthorne of Center for American Progress and Melissa Boteach of Half in Ten write for the The Hill’s Congress Blog about the importance of extending Unemployment Insurance Benefits as soon as possible.

Another week passes and still no up or down Senate vote to extend unemployment insurance. This is no time to play politics. This is no time for “dithering.”

According to the National Employment Law Project, every day 7,000 additional workers are running out of unemployment benefits. That means that since the House passed its bill to extend unemployment insurance on September 22, approximately 266,000 workers have been left high and dry while the Senate continues to delay a vote on this crucial legislation—and 7,000 workers yesterday, 7,000 workers today, and 7,000 workers every day that the Senate puts off this vote are being pushed closer and closer to this brink. Read more »

This January, Half in Ten joined with the National Employment Law Project, NELP, to urge Congress to include urgent reforms to the Unemployment Insurance system in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA. The antiquated unemployment insurance system had failed to ensure equal benefits for low-wage workers, part-time workers, workers who left work due to “compelling family reasons,” and long-term unemployed individuals. Low-wage workers are only one-third as likely to collect unemployment benefits, even though they have double the chances of being unemployed. For this reason, UI reform was one of the 12 steps that the Center for American Progress Task Force on Poverty identified to cut poverty in half in ten years.

Congress listened to advocates, and included unemployment reform in ARRA, allocating $7 billion for the project. And these reforms have begun to reach unemployed workers across the country. Earlier this week, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a report (PDF) detailing the “unprecedented wave” of unemployment insurance reforms that has swept across the country since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) became law on February 17th, 2009. Read more »

From Coalition on Human Needs, a Half in Ten partner:

When Congress passed its Budget Resolution on April 27, it generally endorsed the President’s priorities. The Budget Resolution only answers some of the year’s policy-making questions: what, and, at least as far as the annual appropriations bottom line is concerned, how much. Advocates were pleased with the “what” answers: Congress committed to grapple with comprehensive health care reform and climate change, two of the President’s top priorities. The Budget Resolution also commits Congress to many other legislative tasks, including reauthorizing child nutrition programs, making student loans cheaper by reducing the role of private lenders, and creating a home visiting programfor new parents, as the President proposed.

Read more »

Building efficiency retrofits serve the triple benefits of mitigating global warming emissions, reducing energy bills, and creating good, local jobs. Residential buildings alone account for 21percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and substantial efficiency savings are obtainable through easy and proven techniques. Yet if energy-efficiency retrofits offer such obvious environmental, economic, and employment benefits, why have they been so slow to materialize? The answer lies in a host of market failures, and developing viable, scalable solutions has proven challenging—until now.

On Friday, May 15, Half in Ten joined the Center for American Progress and the Center for Working Families to release a report that provides a policy roadmap for New York State to achieve mass-scale, energy-efficiency retrofits of 1 million housing units over the next five years.

Download the report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Watch the event

In accordance with federal standards, Kansas has just passed into law SB 160, raising the minimum wage - formerly the lowest in the country - from $2.65 an hour to $7.25. The wage increase goes into effect January 1, 2010. To read more about this and reactions from the Governor’s and State Minority Leader’s offices, click here.

In his presentation, The Science of Early Childhood Development: Closing the Gap Between What We know and What we Do, Dr. Jack Shonkoff illustrates the ways that stresses like poverty can permanently impair children’s development.

Poverty and Early Childhood Development (pdf)

Unemployment Insurance helps keep families from losing their homes and falling into poverty when workers lose their jobs, and economists tell us that it is among the most effective forms of stimulus.

Click here to tell your members of Congress to include UIMA in the recovery package today! Please note that this campaign is no longer active.

February 4, 2009

Click here to read Half in Ten’s summary on the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

From the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a Half in Ten partner-

Take Action Now:

Call your senators at 202-224-3121 and tell them to help the children and families most in need by passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (S.1) with a Child Tax Credit (CTC) without an earnings threshold. Read more »

Harry J. Holzer
The Urban Institute

As the nation’s labor market slides into a deeper recession, what kinds of employment and training provisions should be included for our least-educated and most-disadvantaged workers? Read more »