By Alex Eriksen
As the holiday season begins, there’s one place in the Fulton Street Mall that’s busy as ever: the unemployment office. Every day, people wait in line at the New York Department of Labor to talk to job counselors, get the latest listings, and attend seminars on resume writing. Finding employment can be a full-time job.
Once you pass the lobby’s metal detectors and X-ray machine, you make your way to a waiting room on the fourth floor. It’s little more than a cluster of chairs around a receptionist’s desk, which has a long line of people in front of it. The room is cramped; there’s no way out except back across the line of people waiting and the line never has gaps. On the walls are posters in Spanish and English about worker discrimination.
Carey Robbins, 57, from Canarsie, sits and waits for a seminar to begin; he’s wearing his denim work clothes, with his name stitched in gold above the breast pocket of his coat. You could easily mistake him for the building’s maintenance man. Robbins, an electrician, has been out of work for a week. He was laid off from Matros Automated, an electrical construction company. “I applied for work at the Nets stadium but they’re not ready to install the electrics yet,” he says.
Robbins has a wife and a 15-year-old daughter to take care of. He has the short term and the long on his mind. Long term, he worries he’ll never be able to afford to send his daughter to college. “I asked my accountant. He said I’d never have enough, and this was when times were good.”
Usually when he needs work he turns to the electrical workers union. Through the union, he’s in line to work at the city’s airports. “They said I was next in line for work but nothing’s happened,” says Robbins. “Bills are piling up, the mortgage is due, it’s frustrating.”
For people out of work longer, the only registered form of income they may have is their unemployment insurance, up to $400 a week. Those payments are now in jeopardy of being taken away from nearly 200,000 New Yorkers, 100,000 of them in New York City. Last week, legislation before the U.S. House of Representatives failed that would have extended benefits for another three months. The House is now on recess for Thanksgiving, which began last Friday, Nov. 19. House members will not reconvene until Nov. 29, meaning lawmakers will have one day to decide whether to extend the benefits before they run out.
“This is a serious problem because time is not on their side,” says Henry Silverman, a manager at the Department of Labor for over 40 years. Both state and federal unemployment benefits, which were extended in July, will run out if an extension is not passed before the Nov. 30 deadline.
Those collecting benefits for more than 20 weeks, Tier 1 beneficiaries, will be taken off the rolls as those on lower three tiers move up. With the unemployment rate holding around 9.6% nationally, there are more than enough candidates. According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics, 8.7 million Americans were receiving unemployment benefits in October. By December, the Bureau projects that almost two million will lose them.
Jean Stewart, a woman in her late 40s, will be one of them. She’s been out of work and on unemployment for a year. She comes here often, mainly to fight of a sense she isn’t doing enough. “It keeps you going, like you’re in the working crowd,” she says, “you feel like your missing something if you stay at home.” Stewart’s home is a shelter, since her home on Church and Flatbush avenues burned down a year ago.
“I think what’s going to happen is that people are going to face the wall,” says Silverman. The bricks in that wall are things like rent, bills, medical costs, and credit card debt.
Silverman says he doesn’t talk to many people with serious credit card debt, but sees it as a real danger for those seeking employment. “Many employers look at credit ratings, they don’t go by personal ratings anymore,” he says. “They don’t go by friends or family or religious groups or people you knew in college or fraternal or social organizations, they look at credit ratings.”
The temporary lifeline that credit cards can offer, he says, is tempting when facing bills past due. However, relief is temporary, and losing a card because you can’t pay will hurt your credit score.
But those facing the loss of their benefits are not without options. They may remain eligible for other programs, such as food stamps, Public Assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or the HUD Public Housing Assistance Program, which can provide food or money to those in need.
Silverman says that other places in the city have been hit harder than Brooklyn, and that he sees work opportunities in restaurants and hotels. Still, this is slim comfort for those still looking for work.
I think that some people think that those jobs are just going to fall off the back of a truck,” he says, “and they’re not.”
Leave a Reply