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 »

Americans increasingly face financial uncertainty as they struggle to make ends meet during a period of rising food and fuel prices, a continuing mortgage crisis, and an overall economic downturn. Yet even before these latest challenges, a growing number of state and local governments launched comprehensive anti-poverty initiatives. These include special legislative caucuses, poverty reduction targets, and information-sharing summits.
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Dozens of grassroots community organizations gathered at the Hartford Boys and Girls Club, along with Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez, Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, and a number of state legislators. Over 120 people attended a roundtable discussion and press conference in support of an increase in the Connecticut minimum wage – recently raised by the state legislature, which overrode Governor Jodi Rell’s veto. Later in the day in Bridgeport, over 250 residents and local elected officials took part in an event at the site of a new residential development, highlighting the need for more affordable housing in the area. Speaking to reporters, Marilyn Ondrasik, the executive director of the Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition, said that, “Addressing poverty needs to start right here, right now.”

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