Part-time workers are people too!

For years, the smart people in our country have been talking about expanding unemployment benefits to add part-time workers. In most states, jobless individuals who work part time and are canned don’t get an unemployment check, even though they essentially paid into the system because their wages were taxed to finance the unemployment insurance program.

President Obama wants to change that and he’s offering incentives in his proposed stimulus package to get states to start opening up the jobless piggy bank for those poor souls who toil away for years in part-time gigs but see nothing for it when they’re handed a pink slip.

Basically, he’s offering billions in incentives so that states expand unemployment insurance laws.

This from the Wall Street Journal last month:

President-elect Barack Obama plans to offer states $7 billion as incentive to permanently change their unemployment-insurance laws to cover part-time workers and prevent other laid-off workers from falling through cracks in the coverage.

The proposal, which is set to be included in the president-elect’s two-year economic-stimulus plan, will seek to use short-term aid to cash-strapped states to force long-term changes that the Obama team believes are overdue.

The incentives would be paid to states if they update their laws to include everything from covering part-timers to not penalizing workers who had to take time off for a family illness, for example.

Such changes would bring the 75 year old unemployment insurance program out of the dark ages.

This from industry trade publication, Workforce Management magazine:

Changes to unemployment insurance woven into the package can’t come too soon for observers who say the nation’s safety net is showing its age. At a time when legions of Americans are losing their jobs and the economy is teetering, critics say the jobless benefits program is fraught with problems, including inadequate funding, skimpy benefit payments and fusty eligibility requirements that haven’t evolved with the workplace.

An update to the system is a win-win for workers and employers, says Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington, who has been a leading advocate for unemployment insurance reforms.

“We can’t adequately help the unemployed and our economy just by pumping resources into an unemployment program that is not designed for today’s crisis,” McDermott said in a statement this month. “When we enable more unemployed workers to qualify for the unemployment insurance program, we put cash into the pockets of struggling families who will spend this money in their communities, supporting local jobs and businesses.”

There’s a compelling reason to allow part-time workers to collect unemployment today. More and more companies have opted to hire part-timers as a way to get out of paying benefits, and all the other costs associated with having someone work full time.

Given that, mass layoffs, as we’ve experienced during this recession, will hit the part-time workforce and the economy hard because there are so many of you out there.

This from a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic report put out last month:

In December, the number of persons who worked part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) continued to increase, reaching 8.0 million. The number of such workers rose by 3.4 million over the past 12 months. This category includes persons who would like to work full time but were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find full-time jobs.

How do we get our economy back on track when hard-working Americans, be they part-timers or full-timers, don’t have some sort of safety net to weather the economic storms?