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Where are the workers? Cutoff of jobless aid spurs no influx
Oct 22, 2021 2 mins, 4 secs
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Earlier this year, an insistent cry arose from business leaders and Republican governors: Cut off a $300-a-week federal supplement for unemployed Americans.

Many people, they argued, would then come off the sidelines and take the millions of jobs that employers were desperate to fill.

In states that cut off the $300 check, the workforce — the number of people who either have a job or are looking for one — has risen no more than it has in the states that maintained the payment.

The economy still has 5 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic.

The $300-a-week federal check, on top of regular state jobless aid, meant that many of the unemployed received more in benefits than they earned at their old jobs.

An earlier study by Arindrajit Dube, an economist at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and several colleagues found that the states that cut off the $300 federal payment saw a small increase in the number of unemployed taking jobs.

Losing the $300-a-week federal payment hasn’t changed her mind.

A result is that some people are taking time to consider their options before rushing back into the job market.

Graham Berryman, a 44-year-old resident of Springfield, Missouri, has been living off savings since Missouri cut off the $300-a-week federal jobless payment in June.

Sarah Hamby of Kokomo, Indiana, lost her $300-a-week federal payment this summer after Gov.

Exacerbating the labor shortfall, a record number of people quit their jobs in August, in some cases spurred by the prospect of higher pay elsewhere.

In Missouri, a group of businesses, still frustrated by labor shortages more than three months after the state cut off the $300-a-week federal jobless checks, paid for billboards in Springfield that said: “Get Off Your Butt!” and “Get.

Richard von Glahn, policy director for Missouri Jobs With Justice, an advocacy group, suggested that many people on the sidelines of the job market want more benefits or the flexibility to care for children.

In Wyoming, fewer people are in the workforce now than when the state cut off all emergency jobless aid.

Fear of contracting COVID-19 likely discouraged some people from seeking jobs, Wenlin Liu, chief economist at the state Economic Analysis Division, said last week.

“Wyoming,” Brown said, “is not interested in continuing to allow the federal government to keep people away from jobs, paying them as much to stay home in some cases as to go and get a job.”.

Yet it had fewer people working in August than in May.

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