2 key COVID-19 safety nets ending
Unemployment benefits unlikely to be restarted
WASHINGTON – Mary Taboniar went 15 months without a paycheck, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. A housekeeper at the Hilton Hawaiian Village resort in Honolulu, the single mother of two saw her income completely vanish as the coronavirus devastated the hospitality industry.
For more than a year, Taboniar depended entirely on boosted unemployment benefits and a network of local food banks to feed her family. Even this summer, as the vaccine rollout took hold and tourists began to travel again, her work was slow to return, peaking at 11 days in August – about half her pre-pandemic workload.
Taboniar is one of millions of Americans for whom Labor Day 2021 represents a perilous crossroads. Two primary anchors of the government’s COVID-19 protection package are ending or have recently ended. As of Monday, an estimated 8.9 million people lost all unemployment benefits. A federal eviction moratorium already has expired.
While other aspects of pandemic assistance including rental aid and the expanded Child Tax Credit are still widely available, untold millions of Americans faced Labor Day with a suddenly shrunken social safety net.
“This will be a double whammy of hardship,” said Jamie Contreras, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, which represents custodians in office buildings and food service workers in airports. “We’re not anywhere near done. People still need help. … For millions of people, nothing has changed from a year and a half ago.”
For Taboniar, 43, that means her unemployment benefits will disappear – even as her work hours vanish again.
“It’s really scaring me,” she said. “How can I pay rent if I don’t have unemployment and my job isn’t back?”
She’s planning to apply for the newly expanded SNAP assistance program, better known as food stamps, but doubts that will be enough to make up the difference. “I’m just grasping for
anything,” she said.
President Joe Biden’s administration believes the U.S. economy is strong enough not to be rattled by evictions or the drop in unemployment benefits. Officials maintain that other elements of the safety net – like the Child Tax Credit and the SNAP program, which Biden permanently boosted earlier this summer – are enough to smooth things over. On Friday, a White House spokesperson said there were no plans to reevaluate the end of the federal unemployment assistance supplement.
Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said he believed the country’s labor force was ready for the shift.
“Overall the economy is moving forward and recovering,” Walsh said. “I think the American economy and the American worker are in a better position going into Labor Day 2021 than they were on Labor Day 2020.”
Walsh and others point to encouraging job numbers; as of Friday the unemployment rate was down to a fairly healthy 5.2%. But Andrew Stettler, a senior fellow with the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, said the
end of the expanded unemployment benefits is still coming too early.
Rather than setting an arbitrary deadline, Stettler said the administration should have tied the end of the the protections to specific economic recovery metrics. He suggested three consecutive months with nationwide unemployment below 5% as a reasonable benchmark to trigger the end of the pandemic unemployment benefits.
“This does seem to be the wrong policy decision based on where we are,” Stettler said.
Biden and the Democrats who control Congress are at a crossroads, allowing the aid to expire as they focus instead on his more sweeping “build back better” package of infrastructure and other spending. The $3.5 trillion proposal would rebuild many of the safety net programs, but it faces hurdles in the closely divided Congress.
In the meantime, families will have to make do.
“These are two very important things that are expiring. There’s no doubt that there will be families impacted by their expiration and that they will have additional hardship,” Sharon Parrott, the president of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said in an interview.
The COVID-19 response has been sweeping in its size and scope – some $5 trillion in federal expenditures so far.
Congressional Republicans had supported some of the initial COVID-19 outlays but voted in lockstep against Biden’s $1.9 trillion recovery package earlier this year as unnecessary. Many argued against extending another round of unemployment aid.
There are still multiple avenues of support available, although in some cases the actual delivery of that support has been problematic.
States with higher levels of unemployment can use the $350 billion worth of aid they received from the relief package to expand their own jobless payments, as noted by an Aug. 19 letter by Walsh and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Federal rental assistance funds remain available, though the money has been slow to get out the door, leaving the White House and lawmakers pushing state and local officials to disperse funds more quickly to landlords and tenants.
And the economy still faces hurdles. Union officials say positions like hotel housekeepers and office janitorial staffs have been the slowest to recover.
“Our industry is the tip of the spear when it comes to COVID,” said D. Taylor, president of UNITE HERE, a union that represents hotel housekeepers – a field that is “primarily staffed by women and people of color.” Many of those housekeepers never returned to full employment even as Americans resumed traveling and as hotel occupancy rates swelled over the summer.
Taylor said several major hotel chains have moved to permanently cut down on labor costs by reducing levels of service under the guise of COVID-19. Taboniar’s hotel in Hawaii, for example, has shifted to cleaning rooms every five days unless the guest specifically requests otherwise in advance.
The delta variant of the coronavirus also poses a challenge, threatening future school closures and the delay of plans to return workers to their offices.
Walsh called the delta variant “an asterisk on everything.”