US Senate needs to extend federal unemployment benefit
We were on a long-awaited road trip in mid-March with our three children when the world we knew began to fall apart.
The further into the trip we got, the more businesses, stores and restaurants shut down due to the pandemic. When we got back home, we got catastrophic news: Jared was being furloughed indefinitely from his job at a timeshare vacation company.
It was difficult not to panic. Our children are 14, 12 and 16 months old, and we had been living nearly paycheck to paycheck before the pandemic. We did not have significant savings. Once Jared’s final paychecks ran out, how would we pay for rent, food, and other necessities?
We applied for unemployment as soon as we could. As has been the case for so many Floridians, it caused a lot of headaches and took several weeks, but we were lucky in that our application was finally processed and approved. That helped us avoid falling deeply into a financial hole. In fact, those unemployment benefits have been a lifeline, allowing us to keep up with our bills and continue supporting our kids’ education and well-being during this crisis.
Without the improvements to unemployment insurance that Congress approved, our family would be in real trouble right now. The weekly $600 federal unemployment benefit has been especially crucial for us. Without it, we’d only be receiving about one quarter of what Jared’s paycheck had been, which wouldn’t be nearly enough for us to make ends meet.
Now, we’re terrified that we will soon fall off the financial cliff we avoided in the spring, because that $600 per week boost is set to expire on July 31. If it isn’t extended, we don’t know how we will pay for basic necessities like rent and food, as well as all the extra expenses that come with having a baby, such as diapers, wipes, diaper paste, baby food, teething gel and teething toys, and much more.
We absolutely want to be working, but the vacation industry was hit very hard and we were recently informed that Jared was let go from his position, as were many of his now former co-workers. The job market is really tough right now, and he hasn’t been able to find a new job — and one of us has to stay at home because schools and camps are closed and trustworthy child care is incredibly expensive and very hard to find, especially for infants.
That’s why it’s so important for us — and for so many other struggling families — that Congress extend these unemployment benefits indefinitely for now and make major improvements to our unemployment insurance system. Unless they do, families like ours won’t be able to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads without falling deeply into debt.
The House of Representatives has already done right by our family by extending the benefits in the HEROES Act. Now it’s time for Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott to take action and stand up for our family and the millions like us around the state. If the extra unemployment benefits are not extended, we don’t know what we will do, and not many landlords are understanding, despite the pandemic going on all around us.
The pandemic and the economic crisis it has caused won’t magically disappear on July 31 and neither should the lifeline we are depending on. We hope for the best but fear that working families like ours will continue to struggle for quite some time.
We’re counting on lawmakers to step up and protect our economic security, and our future. We need to call on the U.S. Senate to extend these crucial improvements to unemployment insurance, so families like ours won’t face financial ruin. Strickland, Dennington and their three children live in St. Augustine and are members of MomsRising, an advocacy group for women’s issues. Jared Strickland is a vacation industry employee who was laid off because of the pandemic. Karla Dennington is a stay-at-home mom who oversees their children’s online distance learning.